News
New PlanetS mailing lists
To facilitate communication among PlanetS members we created new mailing lists. They all belong to the domain nccr-planets.ch and can be used by sending emails to LIST_NAME@nccr.planets.ch, where LIST_NAME is one of the lists presented below. Currently, all mailing lists are set to “non-moderated”, which means that emails sent to the list are forwarded to […]
Continue Reading
Preparing the site visit
This year the visit of the expert panel mandated by the SNSF will be held at the Astronomical Observatory of the University of Geneva, co-leading house of the NCCR PlanetS, on 24 and 25 May 2016. The first day will begin with the annual report of the Director and will be followed by presentations of […]
Continue Reading
PlanetS Member Quiz
Who said what Here are three of our featured collaborators of the month. Find out who is who and who said what. Fill out the form below with your solution and send it to us. The first three correct entries will win a little prize that will be presented at the site visit at the […]
Continue Reading
Planet 9 takes shape
Astrophysicists at the University of Bern have modelled the evolution of the putative planet in the outer solar system. They estimate that the object has a present-day radius equal to 3.7 Earth radii and a temperature of minus 226 degrees Celsius. In the far infrared the planet is much brighter than in the visual. How […]
Continue Reading
3000 drawings for CHEOPS
Children in Switzerland and all over Europe made thousands of imaginative drawings of stars, planets, rockets, satellites, aliens and CHEOPS. 3000 entries to the drawing campaign organised by the University of Bern will fly into space with CHEOPS, a space telescope being built in collaboration between the European Space Agency (ESA) and Switzerland. You can […]
Continue Reading
Planning Starts for HIRES Instruments on the E-ELT
The Universities of Bern and Geneva and members of the NCCR PlanetS are involved in one of the instruments for the world’s biggest telescope. Scientists and engineers have begun mapping out the detailed specifications of two new instruments that will be part of the instrument suite on ESO’s forthcoming European Extremely Large Telescope (http://www.eso.org/public/teles-instr/e-elt/) (E-ELT). […]
Continue Reading
Water in the atmosphere of a Super-Jupiter
Kappa Andromedae b is one of the few substellar objects outside our Solar System that has been directly photographed. Whereas astronomers still debate as to whether the object is an exoplanet or a brown dwarf, Kamen Todorov, member of the NCCR PlanetS at ETH Zürich, and colleagues measured the amount of water vapour in the […]
Continue Reading
Water in the atmosphere of Kappa And b
New estimate of the water abundance in a planetary mass object spatially resolved from its host star. Dr. Kamen Todorov of ETH led a team that modelled the spectrum of Kappa And b. We hope to coordinate our efforts in this area through the NCCR PlanetS and apply similar techniques to other directly imaged planets. […]
Continue Reading
NCCR PlanetS
Dear Reader, The year 2016 barely began when the claim was made that there is evidence for a yet undiscovered planet (Planet 9) within our solar system. You would think that nothing could stir more the astronomy community and the general public…. But here comes the direct detection of gravitational waves and the excitement reaches […]
Continue Reading
Swiss camera flies to Mars
On 14 March 2016, a new Mars mission will be launched from Baikonur in Kazakhstan. Aboard the European spacecraft is a camera built at the University of Bern – in a record time as team leader Nicolas Thomas explains. Originally, the team in Bern was selected by NASA to provide a Swiss-built telescope for an […]
Continue Reading
