news 2020

An international team lead by researchers of the University of Geneva has discovered a six-planets system. Almost visible to the naked eye in the Draco constellation, the star HD 158259 has been observed for the last seven years by astronomers using the SOPHIE spectrograph. This instrument, installed at the Haute-Provence Observatory in the South of France, acquired three hundred measurements of the star.

One of the basic building blocks of life is nitrogen. An international consortium was able to detect ammonium salt containing nitrogen on the cometary surface of Chury thanks to a method using analogues for comet material. The method on which the study on the detection of ammonium salt is based was developed at the University of Bern.

An international team of astronomers, led by UNIGE, has discovered a planet where it rains iron. Thanks to a new instrument conceived by the University of Geneva , Switzerland, and set at the Very Large Telescope (VLT) of the European Southern Observatory (ESO), an international team of researchers, led by UNIGE, has observed a planet featuring iron rains.

A researcher from the University of Geneva has solved a scientific controversy about the speed of the expansion of the universe by suggesting that it is not totally homogeneous on a large scale. The earth, solar system, entire Milky Way and the few thousand galaxies closest to us move in a vast "bubble" that is 250 million light years in diameter, where the average density of matter is half as large as for the rest of the universe.

Researchers at the Paul Scherrer Institute PSI have measured a property of the neutron more precisely than ever before. In the process they found out that the elementary particle has a significantly smaller electric dipole moment than was previously assumed. With that, it has also become less likely that this dipole moment can help to explain the origin of all matter in the universe.

CO2 concentrations in the air continue to rise rapidly, and a rapid reduction in man-made emissions is becoming increasingly important. In order to assess the effectiveness of political measures, timely and reliable emission levels are needed. However, current methods are costly. The European Space Agency ESA is therefore working on the development of new satellites which will be able to determine CO2 emissions in the future - with the help of Empa.

Fifteen months after the successful landing of the NASA InSight mission on Mars, first scientific analyses of ETH Zurich researchers and their partners reveal that the planet is seismically active. The recorded data enables a better understanding of the interior of Mars, the primary goal of the InSight mission.

Next milestone in the commissioning of CHEOPS: After the successful opening of the space telescope cover on January 29, 2020, CHEOPS has now taken its first images of the sky. CHEOPS is a joint mission of the European Space Agency (ESA) and Switzerland, led by the University of Bern, in collaboration with the University of Geneva.

Under the leadership of astrophysicist Kathrin Altwegg, Bernese researchers have found an explanation for why very little nitrogen could previously be accounted for in the nebulous covering of comets: the building block for life predominantly occurs in the form of ammonium salts, the occurrence of which could not previously be measured.

Phosphorus, present in our DNA and cell membranes, is an essential element for life. But how it became available on the early Earth when life appeared here about 4 billion years ago is something of a mystery. For the first time, astronomers - among them researchers from the University of Bern - have now been able to show that molecules with phosphorus are formed in star-forming regions and probably came to Earth with comets.

Researchers determined the age of stardust from a meteorite to be seven billion years - the oldest solid material ever found on Earth. Stars have life cycles. They're born when bits of dust and gas floating through space find each other and collapse in on each other and heat up. They burn for millions to billions of years, and then they die.

New measurements using gravitational lensing, an innovative method that EPFL researchers have been working on for many years, suggest the universe is expanding faster than previously thought. A team of astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have announced that the universe is expanding faster than expected.

Quantum mechanics is a well-established theory, but at a macroscopic level it leads to intractable contradictions. Now ETH physicists are proposing to resolve the problem with the aid of neural networks. Necessity is the mother of invention.