Astrophysics of Interstellar Matter
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1 month 3 weeks ago
Congratulations to Marion Zannese on winning the Prix Jeunes Talents France For Women In Science 2024 from the L'Oréal-UNESCO Foundation!
Marion Zannese, who defended her thesis on 26 September entitled ‘High excitation of molecules in irradiated regions of star and planetary formation observed with the James Webb Space Telescope’, under the supervision of Émilie Habart and Benoit Tabone, is now a post-doctoral fellow at the IAS, where she will continue her work on the study of irradiated regions of star and planetary formation with the JWST.
5 months 2 weeks ago
An international research team involving scientists from IAS and other laboratories has just revealed the chemical composition of a disk of matter rotating around a young star, where new planets are forming. The results reveal the largest number of carbon-containing molecules observed to date in such a disk, and have implications for the potential composition of planets that could form around this star. These results, published in the journal Science, were obtained as part of the MIRI instrument's guaranteed time program, developed by a consortium of laboratories in Europe and the USA and involving the IAS.
6 months 5 days ago
The first scientific results from Euclid, the European space cosmology mission, were unveiled on Thursday May 23, 2024: 15 scientific papers, including 5 general ones about the space mission, its instruments and processing, and 10 on the first astrophysical observations. These first observations and articles confirm Euclid's performances, and mark the start of the “Euclid era” for cosmology. The nominal mission will last 6 years, with partial data delivery within 1 year, and the first data delivery within 2 years.
7 months 6 days ago
The Horsehead Nebula has been discovered in the visible range as a dark cloud appearing in extinction at the edge of a giant molecular complex in Orion. It is a photo-dominated region (PDR) illuminated by a massive star. It is of great interest to astrophysicists, as it is the ideal object for understanding the interactions between UV radiation emitted by stars and interstellar matter, the way radiation propagates inside dense clouds, and the impact of radiation on matter (photo-evaporation, ionization, dissociation, fragmentation, heating, etc.).
9 months 1 week ago
An international team, involving scientists from IAS, IRAP, ISMO and LERMA, has shed light on the destruction and reformation of a large quantity of water in the planet-forming disk “d203-506” located at the heart of the Orion Nebula. This discovery was made possible by an original multidisciplinary approach that combines observations from the JWST space telescope and quantum physics calculations. The study, carried out as a part of the PDRs4All¹ Early Release Science (ERS) program and led by Marion Zannese, a PhD student at the Institut d’Astrophysique Spatiale, has been published in Nature Astronomy.