News
Optical bench of ESPRESSO has arrived
After the arrival of the vacuum vessel that was installed last October 2014 in a temporary clean room, it is now the turn of the optical bench of ESPRESSO to be delivered to the University of Geneva Biotech Campus basement. An optical bench arrived by ship and truck from the Canary Islands in a box […]
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New members of PlanetS
„I am passionate about exoplanets“, says Helen Giles. „They’re thrilling.“ A research topic that also attracts Kevin Zihlmann, Miles Timpe and Hongping Deng. The four PhD students are new members of the NCCR PlanetS in Geneva, Bern and Zürich. „I want to find out more about the formation of our planet Earth“, says Kevin Zihlmann. „But […]
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Discover studying with real data
Although it is difficult to compare the Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) on exoplanets with other University of Geneva MOOCs – considering that astronomy studies offer less job prospects than those of management or IT – MOOC Exoplanets has nevertheless been a great success. There were 22,000 registrations, 12,000 were “present” and 1,100 have answered […]
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Open hunt for habitable planets
Bacterium, virus, fungus: Which one of these three things is not considered to be a living organism? The quiz question was quite a challenge for some parents who tried to help their children to win one of the nice space toys, meteorites and other prizes at the event “Jagd nach lebensfreundlichen Planeten” that took place […]
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Epicurus, Hypatia and Nicynon
You can now vote in an IAU worldwide contest to name exoplanets. Since the first entry on 12 August more than 250’000 votes have been registered. Deadline is 31 October 2015. „Epicurus“ should be the new name of 51 Pegasi b according to the “Société Astronomique de Genève”. “It was proposed by Michel Mayor, honorary […]
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Testing CHEOPS on Swiss TV
In August and September, TV crews were filming at the University of Bern, at the Stellarium Gornergrat and in the Musée d’Histoire Naturelle de Genève to report about space and planetary research in Switzerland. „Schweiz aktuell“, SRF1, 21. – 25.9.2015, 19:00 http://www.srf.ch/sendungen/schweiz-aktuell „Einstein“, SRF1, 24.9.2015, 21:00 http://www.srf.ch/sendungen/einstein/sendungen Have a look at the making of the […]
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“Too much water is bad for life”
Planets with a deep, global ocean should be very common. But their habitable zone is much narrower compared to Earth-like planets as Daniel Kitzmann, member of NCCR PlanetS, and his colleagues found in a study published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. PlanetS: In the movie „Interstellar” Matthew McConaughey and Anne Hathaway […]
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NCCR PlanetS
Dear Reader, Almost 2000 exoplanets have been found since our colleagues Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz discovered the first one orbiting a solar-type star exactly twenty years ago. Such an incredible explosion in number is due for one part to the development of instruments with increasing performances and for another part to the fact that […]
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Testing CHEOPS at the University of Bern
The space telescope dedicated to characterize exoplanets is taking shape. A camera installed in a clean room shows how the CHEOPS team prepares the structural and thermal model for tests in the vacuum chamber. In the huge test chamber the CHEOPS engineers run thermal cycles on the telescope’s structural and thermal model (STM): under vacuum […]
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“James Webb is a challenging mission”
Observing exoplanet transits will be one of the big science areas of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), says Mark Clampin, Observatory Project Scientist of the JWST at NASA’s Goddard Space Fight Center. He was one of the speakers at a conference in July in Bern where 185 participants from all over the world discussed […]
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