Latest news


New Horizons Successfully Explores the Kuiper Belt object ‘Ultima Thule’

Published on January 21, 2019

NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft flew past Ultima Thule in the early hours of New Year’s Day, ushering in the era of exploration from the enigmatic Kuiper Belt, a region of primordial objects that holds keys to understanding the origins of the solar system. In addition to being the first to explore Pluto, New Horizons flew by the most distant object ever visited by a spacecraft and became the first to directly explore an object that holds remnants from the birth of our solar system.
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Lake outburst with seismometers listening to the flood

Published on November 12, 2018

An international team of scientists including french researchers from the Institut des Géosciences de l’Environnement (IGE/OSUG, Université Grenoble Alpes/IRD/CNRS/Grenoble INP) have recently studied a particularly devastating flood caused by the sudden drainage of a pro-glacial lake in the Bhotekoshi / Sunkoshi Valley, Nepal. Using a particularly innovative seismic technique that consists in evaluating the ground shaking caused by the flood, the scientists are able to quantify flood processes (...)

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GAIA hints at our galaxy’s turbulent life

Published on September 25, 2018

ESA’s star mapping mission, Gaia, has shown our Milky Way galaxy is still enduring the effects of a near collision that set millions of stars moving like ripples on a pond.

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Focus on…Marielle Malfante (GIPSA-Lab) and the Vosica project

Published on September 11, 2018

The VOSICA project has been developed in the framework of Marielle Malfante’s thesis, supervised by Mauro Dalla Mura and Jérôme Mars of the Sigmaphy team of GIPSA-Lab (CNRS / UGA / Grenoble INP). Her work is supported by LabEx OSUG@2020 and DGA/MRIS. The aim of Marielle Malfante’s thesis is to develop automatic methods of classification in natural environments. She is currently implementing such tools in underwater acoustics and for the monitoring of volcanoes.
In situ volcano monitoring is (...)

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First detection of the simplest organic acid in the protoplanetary disk surrounding a Sun-like young star

Published on August 23, 2018

The formation of planets and the origin of life are among the most intriguing questions for mankind. Using ALMA, an international group of astronomers, including researchers from the Institut de Planétologie et d’Astrophysique de Grenoble (IPAG/OSUG, UGA/CNRS) , have reported the first detection of formic acid towards the TW Hydrae protoplanetary disk, located at only 190 light years from our Sun. This result has been published the 16th july 2018 in Astrophysical journal letters.
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Your summer destination: the Lautaret Alpine Garden!

Published on June 15, 2018

Surrounded by the magnificent glaciers of Alps and the Ecrins National Park, this garden houses over 2,000 plant species and is open to the public all summer long.
The Jardin du Lautaret, part of the Joseph Fourier Alpine Station, opened its doors at the beginning of last June. The garden is found in the Col du Lautaret (Lautaret pass) at a height of 2,100 meters, across from the glaciers of Mount Meije, part of the Ecrins Alpine range. Its rich collections of alpine and mountain plant (...)

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How Earthquakes transform the Earth’s lower crust

Published on April 26, 2018

In this study, researchers propose a new mechanism of "top-down" crustal geodynamics, from the upper crust to the lower crust.
Researchers from the IGE, Institute of Earth Sciences of Grenoble / OSUG (Université Grenoble Alpes / CNRS / IRD / IFSTTAR / Université Savoie Mont Blanc), the University of Oslo and the University of Southern California propose a new mechanism for the geodynamics of the Earth’s crust. It links for the first time the changes of the lower crust with the deformations (...)

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Observations of the birth of crystals

Published on April 11, 2018

A team of researchers from the University of Brussels, the Eindhoven University of Technology and the Institut des Sciences de la Terre (ISTerre/OSUG, CNRS / Université Savoie Mont Blanc / IRD / IFSTTAR / Université Grenoble Alpes) in Grenoble, have uncovered the molecular details of polymorph selection of macromolecule crystals. This result has been published on April 5th in Nature
Crystallizing macromolecules - a required step to understand the structure of proteins, the building blocks (...)

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