Author Archive
It rained on the NGTS
The Next Generation Transit Survey (NGTS) witnessed a rare event for a site like Paranal in Chile. The rain fell into the NGTS building and on other telescopes, an incident which showed the flaws of warning systems based on the measurement of moisture. The weather was beautiful that day at Paranal, the VLT site in […]
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Next General Assembly
As a member of PlanetS you are already booked to spend some time in the Bernese Oberland at the end of January 2016. The next General Assembly will take place from January 25th to 27th, 2016 in Grindelwald. «It’s a central location that everybody can reach within reasonable time,» Yann Alibert, science officer of the […]
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How comets were assembled
Rosetta’s target «Chury» and other comets observed by space missions show common evidence of layered structures and bi-lobed shapes. With 3D computer simulations Martin Jutzi of PlanetS at the University of Bern was able to reconstruct the formation of these features as a result of gentle collisions and mergers. The study has now been published […]
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Investigating alien oceans
Great honour for Nicolas Thomas from PlanetS at the University of Berne: The scientist was selected as part of the imaging team for NASA’s Europa Clipper mission. The mission will help to answer the question whether there is life in the oceans of Jupiter’s moon, Europa. Europa Clipper is a mission under study by the […]
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NCCR PlanetS
Dear Reader, You are looking at the first edition of the e-Newsletter of the National Center for Competence in Research (NCCR) PlanetS. The Swiss National Science Foundation launched PlanetS in June 2014 as a response to an astronomical revolution. The one spawned by the discovery in 1995 of the first planet orbiting another solar-type star […]
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51 Peg b – top secret
Studying the data collected at the Observatory of Haute-Provence the astronomers in Geneva knew something big was coming. But they kept their secret and worked hard to eliminate all sources of error. The Summer of 1995 – like every day at noon, astronomers from the Geneva Observatory interrupted their work for lunch in the cafeteria. […]
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“I could not believe it”
51 Peg b changed our view of the Universe – and the life of its discoverers, Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz. “I thought there was something not working in the software,” remembers Didier Queloz his first reaction when he analyzed the data collected with the spectrometer called ELODIE. Has it always been a goal to discover […]
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Planets for beginners
“When I think that I do not even know what a planet is,” exclaimed Véronique, a specialist in contemporary art, pushing open the doors of “Exoplanets”, the exhibition organized by the Museum of Natural History in Geneva. It is a gray day and light rain sprinkles the city on this fresh Sunday of April, ideal weather […]
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Amazing weather reports
There are clear skies on exoplanet HAT-P-11b, whereas infernal winds are blowing high up on HD 189733 b. Today, with their elaborate instruments on Earth and in space astronomers not only discover new exoplanets, but also gain insight into the atmospheres of these distant worlds. In the future they even hope to detect signals of […]
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Dedicated to planet hunting
At the European Southern Observatory exoplanet science brought a rich harvest in the past, and the future looks even brighter as ESO guest author Gaspare Lo Courto explains in the following article. By Gaspare Lo Courto, ESO This year marks two decades since the discovery of the first exo-planet orbiting another solar-type star, 51 Pegasi […]
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