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The COSIMA instrument on board the Rosetta spacecraft will provide the first high resolution mass spectra of grains collected close to a comet. The imaging system of COSIMA, COSISCOPE, built by Institut d’Astrophysique Spatiale, will locate and characterize the collected cometary grains.
Recent IAS graduate student Stéphane Ilic has been awarded the prestigious Springer Thesis award for his thesis entitled “The Large Scale Structures: A Window on the Dark Components of the Universe”.
The 2014 edition of the Summer Advanced Undergraduate Student Programme “Rencontres de physique de l’infiniment grand à l’infiniment petit” will be held from the 15 to the 25 July 2014 in Orsay, Palaiseau, Paris and Saclay. This year, we will welcome 26 students from all over France, and their promotion will be named after Frédéric and Irène Joliot-Curie.
Living organisms use amino acids exclusively in their L enantiomeric form, a fact known as homochirality. However, the abiotic synthesis of these molecules do produce racemic mixtures (L=D) and the origin of the asymmetry remains hypothetical. The “Astrochimie et Origines” team at IAS operates an experiment dedicated to the photochemistry of ices as templates of interstellar/pre-cometary ices. These ices may be irradiated by an asymmetric light, a circularly polarized, which promotes enantioselectivity in chiral molecules. New results show that enantioselectivity obtained on five different amino acids allows confirming previous results and may help to further precise the astrophysical scenario that may be responsible for the origin of the biomolecular asymmetry at the surface of the primitive Earth.
Our Galaxy’s magnetic field is revealed in a new image from ESA’s Planck satellite. This image was compiled from the first all-sky observations of ‘polarised’ light emitted by interstellar dust in the Milky Way.
