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Our research reaches from the primordial fluctuations in the Universe down to its structuration at the largest scales in the most recent era. We study how the cosmic web elements are forming and evolving both through modelling and observations.
Latest news
The PILOT instrument took off on the morning of the 24th of September from Timmins airport (Ontario, Canada). This third flight of this instrument, on board of a stratospheric balloon, lasted for 25 hours, among which three hours to rise to the ceiling altitude, one hour dedicated to the instrument tuning, and 20 hours of scientific observations at the ceiling (about 38km on daytime and 34km during night). All flight systems and the scientific instrument behaved nominally, and the data produced by the instrument are of very good quality.
On Monday, March 12th, IAS delivered the flight model of the in-flight calibration system (Calibration Unit, CU) of the VIS instrument of the Euclid mission. Euclid is the M2 mission of the ESA Cosmic Vision programme, whose scientific objective is to map the Universe to explain the cause of the acceleration of its expansion. It will achieve this by looking up to 10 billion years in the past and by closely tracking the shape and distribution of galaxies the Universe contains.
Star-forming regions interact with their environment in massive galaxies
An international team of astronomers just witnessed how the sites of the most intense star formation in the early Universe communicate with their surroundings through rapid gas exchange. Their findings offer unprecedented insights into the most rapid evolutionary phase of massive galaxies, about 11 billion years ago.
In 2013, the Planck results showed, for the first time, a discrepancy in the cosmological parameters determined from the cosmic microwave background (CMB) and the number counts of galaxy clusters. This inconsistency was also confirmed by the 2015 Planck results and by independent weak lensing and X-ray observation analyses. Researchers at IAS performed a re-analysis, using the 2016 Planck results, and have shown that the CMB and galaxy cluster data now actually converge to the standard model of cosmology, with cold dark matter and a cosmological constant.
Jean-Loup Puget, Director of Research Emeritus at the IAS and former director of the laboratory has been awarded the Shaw Prize in 2018, the "asian Nobel Prize" in the Astronomy category.
