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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...
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...
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,...
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...
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...
At the heart of our own Galaxy, the Milky Way, lies a supermassive black hole. Located in the constellation Sagittarius, hence its name Sgr A, this black hole is currently inactive. However, strange X-ray signatures have been observed around Sgr A, suggesting that this supermassive black hole may...
The Strasbourg Astronomical Observatory is delighted to be hosting the 2023 edition of the annual days of the Société Française d'Astronomie et d'Astrophysique (SF2A), from 20 to 23 June on the Esplanade campus. More than 500 people have registered for this highlight of French...
After months of thorough testing and bug fixing, the Aladin team is proud to announce the official release of Aladin Lite v3. For outreach The Aladin Lite previewer has been updated: https://aladin.cds.unistra.fr/AladinLite/. Demo with DECaPS DR2 survey images : let...
An international team of astrophysicists has measured the polarization of X-rays from an extragalactic supermassive black hole for the first time using the Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer (IXPE), a new satellite from NASA and the Italian Space Agency. These measurements shed light on...
Black hole X-ray binaries are systems where a star and a black hole of a few solar masses orbit each other. Matter accreted from the star by the intense gravitational field of the black hole is heated to several hundred million degrees and radiates in X-rays. Some of this material is also ejected...