Institut d'astrophysique spatiale

20 minutes of television for 15 years of the Planck project

.IAS was the main subject of a television report broadcast on Téléssonne on December 11th, 2009. The report discuss the motivation of the scientists who proposed and contributed to the making of the "Planck" satellite, a key project of the European Space Agency, and whose goal is to study the first "light" of the universe, also known as the "cosmological background".

The CNES has approved -with the consent of the international partners involved, i.e. Germany, Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Spain and ESA- a 3-year extension of the CoRoT mission, given the results obtained in its first two and a half years of operation.
The extension comes at a time when CoRoT identified the first rocky planet among the large family of known extra solar planets.

Jean-Pierre Bibring, head of the « planetary sciences and extrasolar planets » section at IAS, will receive on the 14th of December the 2009 Whipple medal from the planetary science section of the American Geophysical Union (AGU). This award underlines the major impact of the results of the OMEGA experiment, built and operated under his scientific responsibility, on the mineralogical history of Mars, with major implications on the possible apparition of life on this planet.

The birth of a star is not a calm and quiet place, quite the contrary. Visible and infrared observations show that young stars emit fast and powerful jets of matter (seen in red in the image of HH34, ESO image). These narrow jets collide with the interstellar cloud around the young star and generate shock waves (as in the bottom part of the image) in the same way as when a jet plane crosses the sound barrier.