RSS MAD

Hubble: The Antennae Galaxies found to be closer to us [heic0812]

New research on the Antennae Galaxies using the Advanced Camera for Surveys onboard the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope shows that this proto-typical pair of interacting galaxies is in fact much closer to us than previously thought - at 45 million light-years instead of 65 million light-years.

Gaia: NASA's WMAP poses for ESA's Gaia

Sebastien Bouquillon (SYRTE/Obs. de Paris), Ricky Smart (INAF/OATo, Torino) and Alexandre Andrei (Observatorio Nacional, Rio de Janeiro) have used the 2.2m telescope of the European Southern Observatory at La Silla, Chile, to take several photographs of NASA's Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) satellite in its orbit, which is about 1.5 million kilometres from Earth. Perhaps surprisingly, they did so as part of the preparations for ESA's Gaia mission, which scientifically is totally unrelated to WMAP.

Hubble: Compact galaxies in early Universe pack a big punch [heic0811]

Using the Near Infrared Camera and Multi-Object Spectrometer onboard of the Hubble NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers have made observations of young, surprisingly compact galaxies, each only 5000 light-years across, but weighing 200 thousand million times the mass of the Sun.

Director's Desk: Exo-Planet Roadmap Advisory Team appointed by ESA

An expert advisory team has been appointed by ESA with the purpose of advising the Agency on the best scientific and technological roadmap to pursue in order to address one of the most exciting goals in modern astrophysics: the characterization of terrestrial exo-planets (up to the possible detection of biomarkers). The Exo-Planet Roadmap Advisory Team (EPR-AT) will consult with the scientific community and will report back to the Agency on the time-scale of one year. A Call for White Papers from the scientific community will be issued by ESA in May 2008.

Cosmic Vision: Call for Payload Study Consortia for Cosmic Vision M-class Missions

Marco Polo: Marco Polo Workshop

5 & 6 June 2008 Salle Miramar, La Croisette, Cannes, France Croisette Beach Hotel 13, rue du Canada, 06400 Cannes, France

XEUS: XEUS - Physics of the Hot Evolving Universe: Meeting

Details on the XEUS workshop held at ESTEC on 5 & 6 March 2008. Click on PDF to download the relevant presentation.

COROT: IAU Symposium No.253 - Transiting Planets [Sun, 18 May 2008 22:00:00 UT]

The symposium is motivated by the quickly expanding research on extra-solar planets and the growth of interest in this topic among the astronomy community. Among the many discoveries related to this young field, the detection and study of transiting planets has now emerged as an extremely fruitful research area.

Mars Express: Second Mars Express Data Workshop - HRSC & OMEGA [Tue, 20 May 2008 22:00:00 UT]

Data collected by instruments on board Mars Express are available to the science community through the Planetary Science Archive. In order to facilitate the access, use, processing and analysis of these data, training workshops are organized for the science community at large. This is the second workshop in the series and like the first workshop it focuses on the HRSC (High Resolution Stereo Camera) and OMEGA (Observatoire pour la Minéralogie, l'Eau, les Glaces et l'Activité) instruments.