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Water is essential for life as we know it. However, scientists debate how it reached the Earth and whether the same processes could seed rocky exoplanets orbiting distant stars. The preferred mechanism is water-bearing asteroids bombarding the surface of a young planet. An international research team involving scientists from IAS has just discovered water in the inner disk of the young star PDS 70, well inside of the orbit of two growing giant planets.
Infrared spectra of anhydrous grains from the carbonaceous asteroid Ryugu indicate a connection between one of the reservoirs from which Ryugu's parent body originated and the reservoirs that formed comets and primitive asteroids in the outer protoplanetary disk.
On July 1, Euclid was successfully launched from Cape Canaveral by a Space-X Falcon 9 rocket! The acquisition of the first signals also went according to plan.
The Euclid mission will map the universe, observing thousands of galaxies over the next 6 years, and thus lift the veil on dark matter and dark energy.
The commissioning phase now begins for the next 3 months, providing an opportunity to test the in-flight calibration lamp (calibration unit) developed at the IAS.
An international research team including researchers from IRAP, ISMO and IAS (CNRS and University Paris-Saclay), LERMA, and IPAG, used the data collected by the JWST (James Webb Space Telescope, NASA/ESA/CSA) to detect for the first time the methyl cation (CH₃⁺). This detection has been obtained in the protoplanetary disk surrounding a young star in the Orion Molecular Cloud region, approximately 1300 light years from Earth. This detection is the result of a fruitful collaboration between astrophysicists, astrochemists and spectroscopists, including an essential contribution from laboratory spectroscopists.
Friday June 2nd was the 20th anniversary of the launch of the first ESA probe towards another planet, Mars. A celebration was held at the ESA control center (ESOC) in Darmstadt, Germany. Several colleagues from IAS were there representing the laboratory and the OMEGA team.
