Press release


An ancient age for the first known impact crater under the Greenland Ice Sheet

Published on March 11, 2022

Scientists have precisely dated the Hiawatha impact crater, the first known impact crater buried under the Greenland Ice Sheet to 58 million years old – just a few million years younger than the impact that killed off the dinosaurs. The work (involving scientists from IGE & IPAG) led by researchers at the Swedish Museum of Natural History, the Natural History Museum of Denmark, and the Globe Institute University of Copenhagen overturns previous suggestions that the impact may have (...)

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New calculations of worldwide glacial flows and volumes

Published on February 07, 2022

Many mountain populations—in the Andes or Himalayas, for example—rely on glaciers for their water. Yet changes in glacial water reserves, like predictions of sea level rise, greatly depend on glacier volume and thickness, both of which have been poorly evaluated—until now.
By analysing over 800,000 pairs of satellite images, researchers from the CNRS, Université Grenoble Alpes (France) and Dartmouth College (USA) have established the first global map of flow velocities for 98% (>200,000) of (...)

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ALMA Catches “Intruder” Redhanded in Rarely Detected Stellar Flyby Event

Published on January 14, 2022
NRAO Press release

Scientists using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) and the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) made a rare detection of a likely stellar flyby event in the Z Canis Majoris (Z CMa) star system. An intruder—not bound to the system—object came in close proximity to and interacted with the environment surrounding the binary protostar, causing the formation of chaotic, stretched-out streams of dust and gas in the disk surrounding it.
While such intruder-based flyby events (...)

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Watch stars move around the Milky Way’s supermassive black hole in deepest images yet

Published on December 16, 2021
ESO Press release

The European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope Interferometer (ESO’s VLTI) has obtained the deepest and sharpest images to date of the region around the supermassive black hole at the centre of our galaxy. The new images zoom in 20 times more than what was possible before the VLTI and have helped astronomers find a never-before-seen star close to the black hole. By tracking the orbits of stars at the centre of our Milky Way, the team has made the most precise measurement yet of the (...)

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ESO telescope images planet around most massive star pair to date

Published on December 09, 2021
ESO Press release

The European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (ESO’s VLT) has captured an image of a planet orbiting b Centauri, a two-star system that can be seen with the naked eye. This is the hottest and most massive planet-hosting star system found to date, and the planet was spotted orbiting it at 100 times the distance Jupiter orbits the Sun. Some astronomers believed planets could not exist around stars this massive and this hot — until now.
Several members of IPAG/ OSUG are part of the (...)

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An eight-hour Year

Published on December 03, 2021
German Aerospace Center Press Release

Ultra-light and super-fast
As far as extrasolar planets go, ‘GJ 367 b’ is a featherweight. With half the mass of Earth, the newly discovered planet is one of the lightest among the nearly 5000 exoplanets known today. It takes the extrasolar planet approximately eight hours to orbit its parent star. With a diameter of just over 9000 kilometres, GJ 367 b is slightly larger than Mars. The planetary system is located just under 31 light years from Earth and is thus ideal for further (...)

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Urgent need for new approach to combat global grassland degradation

Published on September 08, 2021
A press release from the University of Manchester

Global grasslands are a source of biodiversity and provide a host of benefits to humans, including food production, water supply, and carbon storage. But their future looks bleak without action to halt their degradation and promote their restoration

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Tree fecundity and biological aging

Published on September 06, 2021
Press release INRAE

Researchers from INRAE and Duke University have concluded that tree fecundity peaks or plateaus when trees reach adult size, and then begins to decline. Published on 17 August 2021 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the study examines 597 species from more than 500 sites in North America, South America, Asia, Europe and Africa. Their work has led to the development of a calibrated model to accurately calculate long-term tree fecundity.

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Astronomers make first clear detection of a moon-forming disc around an exoplanet

Published on July 22, 2021
Press release published by ESO

Using the Atacama Large Millimetre/submillimeter Array (ALMA), in which the European Southern Observatory (ESO) is a partner, astronomers leads by Myriam Benisty at The Observatoire des Sciences de l’Univers de Grenoble (OSUG), have unambiguously detected the presence of a disc around a planet outside our Solar System for the first time. The observations will shed new light on how moons and planets form in young stellar systems.
“Our work presents a clear detection of a disc in which (...)

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ALPALGA: the search for mountain snow microalgae

Published on June 08, 2021
Press release CNRS / UGA / Météo-France / INRAE / CEA

The life of the microscopic algae that inhabit snow at high elevations is still relatively unknown. Researchers from the CNRS, CEA, Météo-France, INRAE and the l’Université Grenoble Alpes have therefore created the ALPALGA consortium to study this little-known world, threatened by global warming. Scientists will publish their initial results in Frontiers in Plant Science on 7 June 2021, describing for the first time the distribution of dozens of mountain microalgae species according to elevation.

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