The Bernese camera CaSSIS delivered new high-resolution, colour images of the surface of Mars. They show curious surface features, water-formed minerals, 3D stereo views, and…

Xavier Barcons is Director General of the European Southern Observatory ESO. Last week he travelled to Switzerland for the ESO Council Meeting that took place…

The NCCR PlanetS is now in its second four-year-long phase. 122 members and associates gathered at the end of January 2019 to review what they…

After being able to measure the masses and the diameters of exoplanets, using the information to deduce what materials they have formed from, astronomers now…

Emeline Bolmont has just been appointed Assistant Professor in the Department of Astronomy at the University of Geneva, a position funded by PlanetS. Originally from…

To find out how planets form, astrophysicists run complicated and time consuming computer calculations. Members of the NCCR PlanetS in Bern have now developed a…

Barely three times larger than the Earth, this new planet is the third closest to our solar system ever discovered. An international team of astronomers,…

Earth’s solid surface and clement climate may be in part due to a massive star in the birth environment of the Sun. Without its radioactive…

Researchers at the Universities of Zurich and Cambridge have discovered a new, exotic class of planets outside our solar system. These so-called super-Earths were formed…

“But where did the hot Neptunes go?” This is the question astronomers have been asking for a long time, faced with the mysterious absence of…