News by Subject Space & Planetary

By determining how much energy permeates the center of the Milky Way, researchers have moved closer to understanding the power behind our galaxy.

Astronomers created a stunning new image showing celestial fireworks in star cluster G286.21+0.17.

Several interacting exoplanets have already been spotted by satellites. But a new breakthrough has been achieved with, for the first time, the detection directly from the ground of an extrasolar system of this type. An international collaboration including CNRS researchers has discovered an unusual planetary system, dubbed WASP-148, using the French instrument SOPHIE at the Observatoire de Haute-Provence (CNRS/Aix-Marseille Université;).

Analysis of seismometer data from the InSight Martian lander revealed that different types and frequencies of ambient low-magnitude "microtremors" on Mars were associated with different sources, and some reflected daily variations in wind and solar irradiance, either in distant locations or near the lander. These findings will contribute to future projects seeking to model and monitor the Martian subsurface.

The Moon's subsurface might be richer in metals, like iron and titanium, than researchers thought.

But new research suggests the Moon's subsurface is more metal-rich than previously thought. These new observations could challenge previous theories of how the Moon was formed.

Recently, an international research team led by Dr. CHENG Cheng from Chinese Academy of Sciences South America Center for Astronomy (CASSACA) observed four extragalactic galaxies by using the FAST 19-beam receiver, and detected the neutral hydrogen line emission from three targets with only five minutes of exposure each. This is the first publication for FAST to detect extragalactic neutral hydrogen.

Scientists have identified the binary star Eta Carinae as a new kind of source for very high-energy (VHE) cosmic gamma-radiation. Eta Carinae is located 7500 lightyears away in the constellation Carina in the Southern Sky and, based on the data collected, emits gamma rays with energies up to 400 gigaelectronvolts (GeV), some 100 billion times more than the energy of visible light, as the team reports in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.