Press release

Published on August 24, 2022
Press release ETH Zurich

Researchers at ETH Zurich and Université Grenoble Alpes have reconstructed the extent of Switzerland’s 20th century glacier ice loss for the first time. For this purpose, the researchers used historical imagery and conclude that the country’s glaciers lost half their volume between 1931 and 2016.

Published on May 06, 2022
CNRS Press release

For the past thirty years, the star β Pictoris has fascinated astronomers because it enables them to observe a planetary system in the process of formation. It is made up of at least two young planets, and also contains comets, which were detected as early as 1987. These were the first comets ever observed around a star other than the Sun. Now, an international research team headed by Alain Lecavelier des Etangs, CNRS researcher at the Institut d’Astrophysique de Paris (CNRS/Sorbonne (…)

Published on April 15, 2022
Press release published by UGA

Atmospheric rivers landfalls shown to induce extreme conditions that destabilize Antarctic Peninsula ice shelves according to a new study from researchers (including IGE] from the Université Grenoble Alpes, CNRS, Sorbonne Université and Aix Marseille Université, and from Portugal, Belgium, Germany, and Norway. Their study will be published in the journal of Communications Earth & Environment on April 14, 2022.
80% of the total Antarctica ice output flow through ice shelves confined in (…)

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 (…)

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) (…)

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 (…)

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 (…)

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 (…)

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 (…)

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