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Published on June 20, 2024
News from ESA

Detecting faint objects close to bright stars is incredibly difficult. Yet, by combining data from ESA’s Gaia space telescope with ESO’s GRAVITY instrument on the ground, scientists managed just that. They captured the first light signals of so far unseen dim companions of eight luminous stars. The technique unlocks the tantalising possibility to capture images of planets orbiting close to their host stars.
Have you ever tried to take a picture of a firefly next to a bright streetlight? (…)

Published on June 04, 2024

In a context of increasingly rapid climate change, the accuracy of scientific data plays a vital role. Meteorological observations are used in a wide range of studies, enabling us to better understand the complex interactions taking place within the Earth’s climate system. With this in mind, a team including researchers from the institut des géosciences de l’environnement (IGE- OSUG, CNRS / IRD / INRAE / Grenoble INP / Université Grenoble Alpes), examined in detail the precipitation records (…)

Published on June 03, 2024

Rediscovered historical aerial photographs of East Antarctica offer the earliest insight into ice evolution in Antarctica, revealing that glaciers along nearly 2000 km of coastline have remained stable or have slightly grown over the last 85 years. The results have just been published in the journal Nature Communications and are the result of a collaboration between researchers from the University of Copenhagen, The Norwegian Polar Institute, The Arctic University of Norway, and the (…)

Published on May 31, 2024

At the beginning of April, the European Research Council (ERC) announced the results of the "ERC Advanced Grant 2023" call for established researchers. INSU is the host institution for 4 grants, including 1 to ISTerre awarded to Eric Larose for his project CRACK THE ROCK. Congratulations ! In 2024, the ERC will be funding 255 researchers with "Advanced" fellowships, worth a total of 652 million euros, as part of the Horizon Europe program. These grants enable scientists, recognized in (…)

Published on April 02, 2024

The Amazon is the world’s largest rainforest and river system, vital to the planet’s climate stability and home to irreplaceable biodiversity. It provides critical ecosystem services to the entire globe and the eight sovereign countries and one overseas territory that directly encompass it. The Amazon is home to 47 million people, including more than two million Indigenous people, with their own cultural identities, territorial management practices, and 300 languages. Yet, the Amazon is (…)

Published on March 26, 2024

A study conducted by a team of scientists from the Institut de Planétologie et d’Astrophysique de Grenoble (IPAG - CNRS / UGA) as part of the ERC SPIDI project, has revealed the presence of a massive nascent planet in close orbit around a young star in the Taurus constellation, named CI Tau.
Just 2 million years old - the equivalent of barely a week on a human scale - it is a planet with a mass 3.6 times that of Jupiter, and a period of revolution around the star of 25 days. Such giant (…)

Published on February 05, 2024

The Earth’s polar regions continue to be a hotbed of unexpected atmospheric chemistry phenomena. Although these regions are far away from sources of anthropogenic pollution, these substances can accumulate in the snow and ice. In addition, there are phenomena such as the complete, yet widespread depletion of ground-level ozone occurring only there has intrigued scientists for decades. Now, an innovative manuscript, "Electrical charging of snow and ice in polar regions and the potential (…)

Published on February 01, 2024

Astronomers have, for the first time, made a direct measurement of the mass of a distant black hole, one so far away that light from its surroundings took 11 billion years to reach us. The team, led by Taro Shimizu at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Germany, involving scientists from the Institute of Planetology and Astrophysics of Grenoble (IPAG - OSUG), found the black hole, called J0920, to have a mass of about 320 million times that of the Sun. This achievement, (…)

Published on January 10, 2024

How Earth and the Solar System were formed, is an age-old question of humankind. By studying the present state of our planet, scientists were able to trace back our planetary history to the very beginning. Now we know that Earth formed from the dust which encircled the newborn Sun 4.5 billion years ago. An alternative approach to study the origin of our globe is to observe planetary systems currently in the making around distant young stars. An international team of astronomers observed such a system, a young star called HD 144432, surrounded by a dusty planet-forming disk at a distance of 500 light years. The researchers utilized the unique instrumentation suite of the Very Large Telescope Interferometer (VLTI) at the European Southern Observatory’s (ESO) Paranal Observatory in Chile.

Published on November 24, 2023

In the spring, Alpine glaciers sometimes don a sheer red or orangish veil. Known as ‘red snow’ or ‘blood snow’, this phenomenon is caused by the blooming of Sanguina nivaloides, a microscopic alga. Scientists from the CNRS, the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission (CEA), Météo-France, INRAE, and Université Grenoble Alpes turned their attention to this organism, which forms the pillar of a snowy ecosystem still poorly understood. Through their investigation , whose (…)