News
Assembling the flight model
After the engineers at the University of Bern integrated and tested models of the CHEOPS space telescope, they are now working on the hardware that will actually be sent into space. In the clean room especially built for CHEOPS they are assembling the flight model of the instrument. «We are proceeding well,» says Willy Benz, […]
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«We will find Planet 9 in less than a decade»
With his bright red colored hair Konstantin Batygin looks more like a rock musician than an astrophysicist. In fact, he is both: Assistant Professor of Planetary Sciences at Caltech, US, and leader of the hard rock band “The Seventh Season”. He made headlines worldwide in 2016, when he predicted together with Mike Brown the existence […]
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First light in lab for SPIRou
SPIRou is a near infra red instrument mainly designed to detect exoplanets by measuring radial velocities of M dwarf stars and to study star and planet formation measuring the magnetic fields of these objects. It is led by France with participation of members of PlanetS. SPIRou (Spectro Polarimètre Infra Rouge) is a near infra red […]
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Balancing work and life
Ravit Helled is professor at the University of Zürich and Leader of the Academic Platform at the NCCR PlanetS. Find out more about her life as a scientist and mother by clicking on the small magnifying glasses that you see on the rectangular areas on the image of her office. To go back to the […]
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Astronauts visit the Geneva Observatory
There are only 550 in the world who, having carried out at least one orbit around the Earth, have the right to wear the title of “astronaut”. The majority of them are Americans and Russians, only 49 are Europeans. Of these 49, twelve of them traveled to Geneva to visit the astronomical observatory of the […]
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Are there aliens on the dark side of the Moon?
Can you touch the planets? Why can you jump so high on the moon? Ben Moore, together with his wife Katharina Blansjaar, answers a total of 55 galactic questions from children in the new children’s book “Gibt es Aliens auf der dunklen Seite des Mondes?”. The book has recently been published by Kein & Aber. […]
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PlanetS at Fantasy Basel
They were more than 40,000 fanatics of Star Wars, Indiana Jones, Game of Thrones or Lord of the Rings rushing at the gates of the Basel Messe for the 2017 edition of the Fantasy Basel, the biggest convention of its kind in Europe. The 45’000 m2 of Halle 2 of the Messe hosted for three […]
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The Avatar of Michel Mayor ready to conquer the Galaxy
The avatar of Michel Mayor which will be implemented in the video game Eve Online is ready. CCP, the firm which had the idea to put real astronomical data in its game needed the image of a well known scientific to explain the gamers how they have to analyse these data. The data introduced in […]
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The race to trace TRAPPIST-1h
After 60 hours of non-stop work, researchers at the University of Bern being part of an international team reached their hoped-for goal: They were the first to measure the orbital period for the outermost planet of the famous TRAPPIST-1 system which made headlines worldwide. The new result confirms that the seven Earth-size planets around the […]
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Searching with new eyes
In research, searching with new eyes is important if not crucial. Opening his mind, exploring new paths, testing new approaches, scrutinizing differently, and changing the way we think, are always beneficial for new discoveries. Some articles in this INSIDERS volume illustrate this. The CoRoT mission, that opened the path to the discovery of transiting planets […]
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