News

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10 December 2024

25 years of the XMM-Newton satellite

On 10 December 1999, the Ariane 504 rocket, which at the time had a lot to make up for after dropping the Clusters mission in the mangroves of French Guiana, pulled out all the stops to place a 4-tonne, 10-metre-high monster into an orbit rising to 114,000 km. Artist's view of the XMM satellite...

30 October 2024

Serendipitous discovery with Aladin Lite

An American team has just published an article in Nature highlighting the presence of a third star orbiting the high-mass X-ray binary (HMXB) V404 Cygni. The discovery of this third distant companion suggests that the stellar black hole at the heart of the X-ray binary may have formed without a...

28 June 2024

Launch of the SVOM mission

The Franco-Chinese space mission SVOM took off on 22 June 2024. The Strasbourg Astronomical Observatory is in charge of processing the data from one of the instruments on board, the MXT X-ray camera. The main objective of the SVOM mission is to rapidly detect and analyse gamma-ray bursts, which...

31 May 2024

New images from the Euclid satellite

Less than a year after its launch, ESA's Euclid space mission has just published five new never-before-seen views of the Universe. These images, also available with the services of the Strasbourg astronomical Data Centre, demonstrate Euclid's ability to unlock the secrets of the cosmos, in...

8 April 2024

A magnetar challenges the origin of repetitive FRBs

An international scientific team led by Grégory Desvignes, and involving Jérôme Pétri from the Strasbourg Astronomical Observatory, used the Effelsberg and Jodrell Bank radio telescopes to observe a magnetar in precession - a highly magnetised and ultra-dense neutron star - shortly after an...

28 March 2024

The darkest galaxy?

Discovery of the faintest Milky Way satellite. View of the galaxy UMa3/U1 in several astronomical surveys : PanSTARRS DR1 (top left), DESI Legacy survey (top right), DECaLS DR5 (bottom left), et SDSS9 (bottom right). The red ellipse corresponds to the claimed size in the original...

11 January 2024

2024 HEAD Bruno Rossi Prize

The 2024 HEAD Bruno Rossi Prize, the highest distinction in high energy astrophysics, is awarded to: Martin Weisskopf, Paolo Soffitta and the IXPE team "for their development of the Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer whose novel measurements advance our understanding of particle acceleration and...

11 December 2023

An AI rediscovers 74 physical laws

Is deep learning inevitably synonymous with "black boxes"? These methods are often criticized for their lack of transparency, resulting in unintelligible models. This issue is particularly relevant in physics, where the goal is to model the laws governing our universe as comprehensible equations,...

10 November 2023

The missing link of compact dwarf galaxies

An international team of astronomers has captured the eroded remains of 106 dwarf galaxies for the first time. They represent the missing link in their evolution into ultra-compact dwarf galaxies, objects that resemble star clusters, particularly globular clusters, in terms of density but with...

7 November 2023

Dive into Euclid images

ESA’s Euclid space mission, launched in July 2023, reveals its first full-colour images of the cosmos. Never before has a telescope been able to create such razor-sharp astronomical images across such a large patch of the sky, and looking so far into the distant Universe. These five images...