Nov 13, 2024
Is the Standard Model of cosmology, the basis of our understanding of the Universe since the Big Bang, in danger? Recent observations by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), carried out by an international team including the CEA-IRFU Astrophysics Department, have revealed massive galaxies in the young Universe, sparking a lively debate within the scientific community.
Nov 04, 2024
The Sun's magnetic field is generated by a dynamo effect, caused by convection and rotation in its envelope. It will evolve in the distant future when our star becomes a red giant, an evolved star characterised by an extended envelope and much slower rotation.
Oct 23, 2024
The STAARQ team has successfully commissioned the STAARQ test station, including the 1.9K cryogenic process. The team demonstrated at the same time exceptional performance from the MQYYM quadrupole magnet manufactured by IRFU for the HL-LHC project.
Ten years of intense collaborative work between the DACM and DIS teams at IRFU culminated during the summer of 2024 in the successful testing of the MQYYM mock-up superconducting magnet in the new quadrupole accelerator magnet test station, STAARQ.
Oct 22, 2024
NASA has just selected the PRIMA project (The PRObe for Infrared Mission for Astrophysics) for a phase A study, from among around ten proposals. This study phase, which will last one year, will enable the project to be evaluated in depth before a final decision is made. If PRIMA is selected, NASA will allocate a budget of one billion dollars for its development, with a launch scheduled for 2031.
Oct 21, 2024
Understanding the diverse stellar populations that make up galaxies is crucial to studying their formation over cosmic time. Nevertheless, some intractable stars continue to resist the modellers! Their complex nature and short lifetimes make stars in the asymptotic branch of thermally pulsating giants (TP-AGB) difficult to model, a subject of debate for decades. The James Webb Space Telescope is finally lifting the veil on their contribution to the spectrum of distant galaxies.
Oct 15, 2024
Zoom in on the first page of ESA's Euclid cosmic atlas
On 15 October, ESA's Euclid space mission revealed the first piece of its grand map of the Universe, showing millions of stars and galaxies. This first piece of Euclid's survey was revealed at the International Astronautical Congress in Milan by ESA Director General Josef Aschbacher and Director of Science Carole Mundell.
Oct 08, 2024
The New Small Wheels (NSW) are the most important project of the ATLAS Phase-1 upgrade towards the High-Luminosity LHC. IRFU has been heavily involved in the design, construction, integration, commissioning and operations of the NSW. The NSW combine two complementary gas detector technologies: sTGC (small-strip Thin Gap Chambers), and Micromegas (Micro-Mesh Gaseous Structure). The latter was pioneered at CEA-Saclay in collaboration with CERN in the 1990’s.
Sep 04, 2024
During a three-day stratospheric balloon flight, the COMCUBE collaboration successfully tested its space gamma polarimeter COMCUBE, an instrument that will enable the measurement of the linear polarization of gamma-ray bursts. This flight validates the COMCUBE-S project, a swarm of twenty-seven nanosatellites equipped with this new technology by 2030.
Aug 21, 2024
It is well established that most galaxies harbor a supermassive black hole, long suspected of hindering the formation of new stars. However, no study had previously demonstrated a direct link between these black holes and the evolution of galaxies.
Aug 20, 2024
Understanding star formation remains one of astrophysics' great mysteries. Only 1% of the dense molecular gas in galaxies transforms into stars, a phenomenon that scientists are still striving to explain, despite some advancements. As part of the CAFFEINE project, a research team from CEA – Paris-Saclay utilized the ArTéMiS camera on the APEX telescope in Chile to map massive molecular clouds at an unprecedented resolution at submillimeter wavelengths.
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.
Jul 14, 2024
METIS is a first-generation instrument for the ELT, the Extremely Large Telescope currently under construction in the Atacama Desert in Chile, which will see its first light in 2028. Irfu has been involved in this instrument since 2018. In 2021, 14 cryomechanisms that will drive a dozen optical systems on the METIS instrument were delivered. METIS comprises two separate units: one for spectroscopy, the other for imaging. The latter contains coronagraphs, based on phase masks.
Jun 20, 2024
The Euclid Consortium has awarded the Euclid Consortium STAR 2024 prize, in the Senior Scientist category, to Jean-Charles Cuillandre, a researcher in the Astrophysics Department (DAp) of the IRFU at CEA Paris-Saclay, for his customized pipeline that generated Euclid's magnificent "Early Release Observations" (ERO) public images, seen by billions of people, and kick-started the scientific exploitation of the data.
Jun 19, 2024
NASA recently presented the Silver Group Achievement Award to 232 experts worldwide for their contribution to the commissioning of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). These experts worked around the clock during the six months of commissioning. Their hard work ensured that the final performance of all the instruments exceeded the original specifications. The team includes six Frenchmen, four of which belong the Astrophysics Department at Irfu, CEA Paris-Saclay.
Jun 14, 2024
An international research team, including scientists from CEA, has just revealed the chemical composition of a disk of matter rotating around a young star, where new planets are forming. The results reveal the largest number of carbonaceous molecules ever observed in such a disk, including some detected for the first time outside our solar system. These findings have implications for the potential composition of planets forming around this star.
May 30, 2024
The NECTAr chip, developed at IRFU and at the heart of the NectarCAM camera's eyes, is capable of operating in ‘ping-pong mode
In the quest to unravel the mysteries of the Universe, astrophysicists and engineers are pushing the boundaries of technology to capture the fleeting signals of cosmic events. Leading this big effort is the Cherenkov Telescope Array Observatory (CTAO), a global initiative to build the world's most advanced ground-based gamma-ray observatory.
May 28, 2024
A team of theorists from the CEA's Astrophysics Department (DAP), working within the Laboratory for Modeling Astrophysical Plasmas (LMPA), have carried out simulations using the CEA's supercomputers, with the aim of understanding the formation of stars and protoplanetary disks. Months of computational work have enabled us to achieve resolutions never achieved before, revealing new details about the formation of these objects.
May 23, 2024
The Euclid collaboration today publishes five reference papers on the mission and ten scientific papers based on the first images unveiled to the public in November 2023, as well as the new images presented today by ESA.
This phase of preliminary observations conducted last fall provides a glimpse into the telescope's exceptional performance.
May 15, 2024
Although significantly more common in the Universe, ultra-cool dwarf stars remain poorly understood due to their low luminosity. Consequently, our understanding of their planetary population remains limited, even though they represent a substantial fraction of the planets in our Milky Way. It is in this context that the SPECULOOS program was developed, aiming to explore exoplanets around this type of star.
May 03, 2024
An international team of researchers, including members from CEA, utilized NASA's James Webb Space Telescope to map the weather of the hot gas giant WASP-43 b.
Measurements in mid-infrared obtained with the MIRI instrument, combined with 3D climate models and other observations, suggest the presence of thick and dense clouds on the night side, clear skies on the day side, and equatorial winds reaching up to 8,000 km/h, mixing atmospheric gases around the planet.
Apr 03, 2024
The Iseult project has unveiled the first human brain images obtained using a 11.7 teslas MRI, after almost 25 years of work. This world first was made possible thanks to the commitment of over 200 CEA employees, who believed in this extremely ambitious project from the very beginning
In the early 2000s, a Franco-German project was launched to develop ultra-high resolution imaging. One of the objectives was to build an imager whose key component was a superconducting magnet reaching 11.
Mar 28, 2024
Magnetars are neutron stars displaying the most intense magnetic fields observed in the Universe. To tackle the still-open question of the origin of these extreme magnetic fields, a scenario was proposed by a team from the Department of Astrophysics (DAp) at CEA Saclay, invoking the Tayler-Spruit dynamo mechanism, triggered by matter falling onto the young neutron star after the supernova explosion.
Mar 27, 2024
An international team, including the Astrophysics Department of CEA-Saclay, led by the Instituto de Astrofísica e Ciências do Espaço (IA), utilized one of the world's most advanced spectrographs to detect the smallest "stellar tremors" ever recorded in an orange dwarf star, making it the smallest and coldest star observed to date with confirmed solar oscillations.
Mar 20, 2024
UPDATE [03/26/2024]: The optics de-icing procedure has been a success!
UPDATE [03/26/2024]: Euclid's optics de-icing procedure has produced much better results than expected. The main suspect in the blurred vision of Euclid's VIS instrument was the coldest mirror behind the telescope's main optics. After warming it by just 34 degrees, from -147°C to -113°C, was enough for all the icy water to evaporate.
Mar 05, 2024
After being awarded the 2020 Tate Prize for International Leadership in Physics, astrophysicist Dr. Catherine Cesarsky is honored with another prestigious award: the 2024 Fritz Zwicky Prize in Astrophysics & Cosmology for her outstanding contributions to understanding galaxy evolution through infrared space observations, as well as for her leadership in developing contemporary astronomy observation infrastructure.
Feb 28, 2024
XMM-Newton's energetic universe joins forces with the Euclid satellite's vision of the sky. A thousand hours of X-ray observations, over a region 40 times the size of the moon, will complement multi-wavelength studies of the cosmic evolution of galaxy clusters. A decisive association to constrain cosmological scenarios and reveal the nature of dark energy.
Feb 15, 2024
Sara Bolognesi, a physicist in Irfu's particle physics department, has been awarded the CNRS 2024 silver medal in the particle physics speciality. This medal rewards researchers for the originality, quality and importance of their work, which is recognised internationally and contributes to the reputation of French research.
Feb 12, 2024
With more than 5,000 scientists, engineers, technicians, administrators and students, CMS is one of the largest scientific collaborations in the world. With members from more than 240 institutes and universities in nearly 50 countries around the world, the collaboration exploits the data provided by the CMS experiment, one of the two giant general-purpose detectors installed along the circumference of the LHC, CERN's Large Hadron Collider.
Feb 08, 2024
Exotic, very neutron-rich nuclei: a laboratory for nuclear interactions
For the first time, an experiment has provided key observations on the spectroscopy of the neutron-rich unbound oxygen nuclei (proton number Z = 8), oxygen 28 (N = 20) and its neighboring isotope at N = 19, oxygen 27. They were produced in high-energy reactions and observed by direct detection of their decay products, 24O and three or four neutrons.
Feb 02, 2024
On January 17, the T2K collaboration announced the launch of the second phase of its experiment, as stated in a press release. This phase will exploit an upgrade of the beam, whose nominal power has been increased from 450 kW to 710 kW, with the aim of reaching 1.2 MW by 2027. An improved version of the experiment's near detector ND280 is also being implemented, incorporating new time-projection chambers using resistive-Micromegas technology designed and developed by the IRFU teams.
