Institut d'astrophysique spatiale

Planck traces cold dust and reveals the large-scale structure of the Milky Way, our Galaxy

New images from ESA’s Planck mission, in which IAS played a central role, reveal details of the structure of the coldest regions in our Galaxy. Filamentary clouds predominate, connecting the largest to the smallest scales in the Milky Way. These images are a scientific by-product of a mission which will ultimately provide the sharpest picture ever of the early Universe.

Every year at the conference “Jeunes Chercheurs en Physique” Alain Bouissy, representatives form the French Society of Physics (SFP) in Paris-south reward the best poster and the best oral presentation. This event took place on February 18-19, 2010.

Launch of Solar Dynamics Observatory

On February 11, 2010 the new NASA mission, «Solar Dynamics Observatory», (SDO), was successfully launched from the USA. The video of the launch can be retrieved at : http://sdo.gsfc.nasa.gov/

Launched on September 14, 2009 from White Sands Missile Range (New Mexico), the Herschel sounding rocket was carrying two experiments with a strong IAS participation: HECOR and HEIT.
The reduction of raw data is now complete and has produced the images presented today. The HEIT images provide the intensity distribution on the solar disk, which is necessary to analyze the HECOR data. The HECOR image is the best ever obtained of the solar corona in the 30.4 nm resonance line of singly ionized Helium.