Astronomy

Most of a planet’s water is generally not on its surface but hidden deep in its interior. This affects the potential habitability of distant worlds, as shown by model calculations of researchers at ETH Zurich and Princeton University.

Starting today, the Earth will be passing through a meteor shower. But in astronomy, the human eye is very much a limited tool. But increasingly powerful instruments are allowing us to peer ever deeper into the cosmos and ever further back in time, shedding new light on the origins of the universe. 

EPFL officially joined the Multi Spectroscopic Telescope (MUST) project, led by China’s Tsinghua University, as a founding member. This flagship project will enable scientists to better understand the young universe, dark energy and dark matter.

An international team of researchers combine orbital imagery with seismological data from NASA’s Mars InSight lander to derive a new impact rate for meteorite strikes on Mars. Seismology also offers a new tool for determining the density of Mars’ craters and the age of different regions of a planet.

With its secretariat hosted at EPFL, the Square Kilometer Array Switzerland (SKACH) consortium is celebrating two years’ membership of a global project to develop the largest scientific facility ever built by humankind.

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.