Latest news

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 (…)

Published on November 21, 2023

A new study from Université Grenoble Alpes (UGA), Swansea University (UK) and Ghent University (Belgium) provides large-scale evidence that past dispersal success across major barriers was not random, but linked to species characteristics.
The movement of animals across major barriers, such as oceans or mountain ranges, has long intrigued scientists for its role in shaping Earth’s biodiversity. This new study has unveiled groundbreaking insights into this process, showing how (…)

Published on November 14, 2023

Ranked in the top 150 in the global ranking published last August, Université Grenoble Alpes maintains its position in the Shanghai 2023 ranking with a strong performance in the thematic ranking published on 27 October. For 13 disciplines, the university is in the top 100 of the world’s best universities, including 5 in the top 50 and 2 in the top 20. It is therefore the 4th French university in terms of the number of disciplines ranked in the top 100. This new ranking confirms UGA’s position as the country’s leading research-intensive university, after the universities of Ile-de-France.
It ranks 8th among the world’s top universities in remote sensing (1st in France) and 18th (3rd in France) in Earth Sciences, two themes covered by the OSUG laboratories.

Published on August 29, 2023

The amplification of anthropogenic climate change is disrupting our planet, in particular causing a rapid and worrying melting of glaciers worldwide. Published in the prestigious journal Nature, a recent study by an interdisciplinary team of French and Swiss glaciologists and ecologists (including OSUG laboratories) takes us on an unprecedented journey into the future through modeling and exploration of the evolution of glaciers and deglaciated areas on Earth between 2020 and 2100. In future (…)

Published on July 17, 2023

Scientists from OSUG federation (Institut des géosciences de l’environnement of Grenoble and the Centre d’études de la neige) have studied the interactions between sunlight and snow at the micrometer scale, which determines the snow ‘whiteness’ and consequently has a crucial impact in the Earth’s climate. In an article published the 7 July 2023 in Nature Communications, these scientists have defined and quantified a new concept: the optical shape of snow. The impact of this breakthrough is (…)

Published on March 29, 2023

Claude Lorius passed away on March 21st, 2023 at the age of 91. Claude had a huge contribution to the national and international ice core, polar and climate research communities. He will be deeply missed.
Claude Lorius met the polar regions at the time of the International Geophysical Year. He wintered over in 1957 as meteorologist and snow physicist with two other colleagues at the Antarctic station of Charcot. Then, instead of embracing a professional soccer career opportunity, he (…)

Published on March 22, 2023

To date, despite the huge number of exoplanet discoveries, the formation and properties of giant planets remains a mystery. Giant exoplanets sculpt young exoplanetary systems, and might determine whether smaller Earth-like planets could be capable of harboring life. The observation and characterization of the properties of young exoplanets is crucial (i) to help scientists to understand what giant exoplanets are made of, how they differ from Jupiter and Saturn, and (ii) how they formed. (…)

Published on March 15, 2023

Selenium is a micronutrient that plays an essential role in human health but is toxic at high levels. However, new biomedical research has shown selenium actually has anti-cancer properties when used at high doses. To overcome problems with its inherent toxicity, an international research team, led by Professor Steve Conlan in Swansea University and Professor Laurent Charlet (ISTerre / OSUG) at Université Grenoble Alpes, tested whether selenium nanoparticles could be developed as a potential (…)