Jul 19, 2024
Tilepy is a cutting-edge platform designed to optimize and facilitate the scheduling of follow-up observations of multi-messenger events[1]. Developed over the last eight years by a dedicated team of researchers at IRFU, led by Fabian Schussler, the team includes former PhD students Monica Seglar-Arroyo and Halim Ashkar, who began their contributions during their doctoral studies, as well as postdoc Mathieu de Bony de Lavergne.
May 11, 2023
On October 9, 2022, at 13:16 and 59.99 seconds, a gamma-ray burst (GRB) dazzled almost all the X-ray and gamma ray detectors available at the time. Since their discovery, multi-wavelength telescopes in space and on the ground have continuously monitored these events. This outburst, named GRB221009A, shook the world community of astrophysicists, who have since been analysing it to understand the physical phenomena that triggered this most intense burst of energy in our history.
Sep 21, 2021
After three years of reflection and development, the "Astro-Colibri" application has just been launched. This digital interface, created by researchers at Irfu/DPhP, aims to make information on transient and multi-messenger phenomena easily accessible in real time. The need to react quickly to the most violent explosions in the universe and the large amount of information provided by the global network of observatories requires new approaches and new tools.
Jul 23, 2021
Space-based experiments such as the Fermi satellite's Large Area (LAT), which detects gamma rays above 100 MeV, reveal a population of sources with no astrophysical counterpart at other wavelengths. Some of these have the characteristics required to be "dark matter subhalo" candidates predicted by cosmological simulations to populate the Milky Way halo. The range of dark matter candidates with masses below a few hundred GeV are already excluded by Fermi observations.
Jun 04, 2021
On 29 August 2019, scientists from the H.E.S.S. collaboration recorded one of the brightest cosmic explosions ever observed in the Universe. This gamma-ray burst emitted the most energetic photons ever detected in this type of event. Under the direction of Irfu researchers, the observations continued for several days. The analysis of the data collected calls into question the origin of the rays produced during the explosion.
May 17, 2021
After a particularly successful first campaign of tests and measurements, the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) has just successfully started its 5-year observing program.
After a particularly successful first campaign of tests and measurements, the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) has just successfully started its 5-year observing program. The international collaboration, under the lead of Berkeley Lab, has the ambitious goal to carry out the largest survey of galaxies and quasars. It will be used to draw the most accurate 3D map of the Universe and to elucidate the mystery of "dark energy".
Nov 21, 2019
The missing mass of the universe or non-baryonic dark matter is probably made up of particles that remain to be discovered. Massive and neutral, with very weak interactions, they still escape a detection that would identify them. While conventional photons are massless, dark matter could be made up of particles of a new type, similar to massive photons.
Nov 20, 2019
After a decade-long search, scientists have for the first time detected a gamma-ray burst in very-high-energy gamma light. This discovery was made in July 2018 by the H.E.S.S. collaboration using the huge 28-m telescope of the H.E.S.S. array in Namibia. Surprisingly, this Gamma-ray burst, an extremely energetic flash following a cosmological cataclysm, was found to emit very-high-energy gamma-rays long after the initial explosion. This discovery was published in Nature.
Jul 13, 2018
A hundred years old mystery might get resolved with the detection of neutrinos by the IceCube collaboration coming from a known active black hole. Irfu, which coordinate those observations with the H.E.S.S. telescope, did not detect anything for now but the multi-messenger astronomy has just begun…
Apr 09, 2018
The HESS international collaboration, to which CNRS and CEA contribute, has published the results of fifteen years of gamma ray observations of the Milky Way. Its telescopes installed in Namibia have studied populations of pulsar wind nebulae and supernova remnants, as well as microquasars, never before detected in gamma rays. These studies are supplemented by precise measurements such as those of the diffuse emission at the center of our Galaxy.
Oct 16, 2017
The discovery of a new type of gravitational wave
Using a range of detectors developed with the participation of the CEA, physicists at CEA-Irfu have scrutinized the region from which the gravitational wave was detected on August 17, 2017 by LIGO-VIRGO facilities. Unlike the four previous detections of waves of the same type discovered since 2015, this new vibration of space, called GW170817, is of different origin. It does not result from the fusion of two black holes but of two densest known stars, the neutron stars.
Oct 06, 2017
The Cherenkov Telescope Array (CTA) consortium brings together 1300 scientists from 32 countries. They have published their scientific aims in a document over 200 pages long. This is the result of several years of work, and includes contributions from approximately fifteen Irfu researchers involved in X-ray and gamma-ray observatories (Fermi, Integral, XMM-Newton, H.E.S.S., etc.).
Mar 01, 2017
The electronics developed by IRFU now equips the four oldest gamma-ray telescopes of H.E.S.S. (High Energy Stereoscopic System) in Namibia. Making it possible to optimize the simultaneous operation of all five H.E.S.S. telescopes, and confirming the technical choices for its successor CTA (Cherenkov Telescope Array).
