news 2023

A team of astronomers has used asteroseismology, or the study of stellar oscillations, to accurately measure the distance of stars from the Earth. Their research examined thousands of stars and checked the measurements taken during the Gaia mission to study the near Universe. For most of us, the countless bright spots in the nighttime sky all seem to be stars.

Snow measurement has never been so fast and accurate: researchers have developed an artificial intelligence capable of determining snow depth across Switzerland using satellite images. How much snow is there up in the mountains, and where exactly is it? The answer is of just as much interest to the winter tourism industry and operators of hydropower plants as it is to winter sport enthusiasts looking to gauge the risk of avalanches.

An international collaboration between astronomers using the CHEOPS and TESS space satellites, including NCCR PlanetS members from the University of Bern and the University of Geneva, have found a key new system of six transiting planets orbiting a bright star in a harmonic rhythm. This rare property enabled the team to determine the planetary orbits which initially appeared as an unsolvable riddle.

A research team from EPFL and Wageningen University has developed a new artificial intelligence model that recognises floating plastics much more accurately in satellite images than before. This could help to systematically remove plastic litter from the oceans with ships. Our society relies heavily on plastic products and the amount of plastic waste is expected to increase in the future.

Following the success of the Bern solar wind sail on the Apollo Moon missions of the U.S. space agency NASA in the 1960s, the Physics Institute at the University of Bern is to return to the Moon as early as 2027 with the LIMS mass spectrometer as part of the NASA Commercial Lunar Payoad A highly sensitive instrument for measurements on the lunar surface LIMS is a powerful instrument for the examination of a wide variety of samples which meets scientific lunar objectives.

Mars's liquid iron core is smaller and denser than previously thought. Not only is it smaller, but it is also surrounded by a layer of molten rock. This is what researchers conclude on the basis of seismic data from the InSight lander. For four years, NASA's InSight lander recorded tremors on Mars with its seismometer.

Isaac Newton's historic work on gravity was apparently inspired by watching an apple fall to the ground from a tree. But what about an "anti-apple" made of antimatter , would it fall in the same way if it existed? According to Albert Einstein's much-tested theory of general relativity, the modern theory of gravity, antimatter and matter should fall to Earth in the same way.

Swiss engineers are training legged robots for future lunar missions that will search for minerals and raw materials. To ensure that the robots can continue to work even if one of them malfunctions, the researchers are teaching them teamwork. On the Moon, there are raw materials that humanity could one day mine and use.

Harnessing advanced simulation tools, a team of scientists from UNIGE, Northwestern University and University of Florida shed light on the enigmatic nature of these celestial "beasts". Black holes, some of the most captivating entities in the cosmos, possess an immense gravitational pull so strong that not even light can escape.

A team from the University of Geneva has developed the first method for testing together Einstein's and Euler's theories for the accelerating expansion of the Universe and dark matter. The cosmos is a unique laboratory for testing the laws of physics, in particular those of Euler and Einstein. Euler described the movements of celestial objects, while Einstein described the way in which celestial objects distort the Universe.

Scientists have managed to weigh - more precisely than any other technique - a galaxy hosting a quasar, thanks to the fact that it acts as a gravitational lens. Detection of strong gravitational lensing quasars is expected to multiply with the launch of Euclid this summer. A team of researchers from EPFL have found a way to use the phenomenon of strong gravitational lensing to determine with precision - about 3 times more precise than any other technique - the mass of a galaxy containing a quasar, as well as their evolution in cosmic time.

With the help of the CHEOPS space telescope an international team of European astronomers managed to clearly identify the existence of four new exoplanets. The four mini-Neptunes are smaller and cooler, and more difficult to find than the so-called Hot Jupiter exoplanets which have been found in abundance.

A strong quake in the last year of the NASA Mars InSight mission, enabled researchers at ETH Zurich to determine the global thickness and density of the planet's crust. On average, the Martian crust much thicker than the Earth's or the Moon's crust and the planet's main source of heat is radioactive.

Researchers have found strong evidence that supermassive stars can explain the anomalies observed in large clusters of stars. Globular clusters are the most massive and oldest star clusters in the Universe. They can contain up to 1 million of them. The chemical composition of these stars, born at the same time, shows anomalies that are not found in any other population of stars.

The search for radio signals from extraterrestrial civilizations has yet to yield evidence of alien technological activity. Research carried out at EPFL suggests we continue searching while optimizing the use of available resources. For over sixty years, amateur and professional astronomers have been monitoring the sky in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI).

With a constellation of five satellites, the international LIFE initiative led by ETH Zurich hopes to one day detect traces of life on exoplanets. A laboratory experiment in the Department of Physics is now set to demonstrate the planned measurement method. "It's an important step on a very long road," says Adrian Glauser, a senior scientist at the Institute for Particle Physics and Astrophysics at ETH Zurich.

When it comes to measuring how fast the Universe is expanding, the result depends on which side of the Universe you start from. A recent EPFL study has calibrated the best cosmic yardsticks to unprecedented accuracy, shedding new light on what's known as the Hubble tension. The Universe is expanding - but how fast exactly? The answer appears to depend on whether you estimate the cosmic expansion rate - referred to as the Hubble's constant, or H0 - based on the echo of the Big Bang (the cosmic microwave background, or CMB) or you measure H0 directly based on today's stars and galaxies.

Neuroscientists at the University of Zurich have developed innovative objectives for light microscopy by using mirrors to produce images. Their design finds correspondence in mirror telescopes used in astronomy on the one hand and the eyes of scallops on the other. The new objectives enable high-resolution imaging of tissues and organs in a much wider variety of immersion media than with conventional microscope lenses.

For a long time it has been suspected that fullerene and its derivatives could form naturally in the universe. These are large carbon molecules shaped like a football, salad bowl or nanotube. An international team of researchers using the Swiss SLS synchrotron light source at PSI has shown how this reaction works.

A team including physicists of the University of Bern has for the first time detected subatomic particles called neutrinos created by a particle collider, namely at CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC). The discovery promises to deepen scientists- understanding of the nature of neutrinos, which are among the most abundant particles in the universe and key to the solution of the question why there is more matter than antimatter.