The MMX mission successfully launched on 19 October, heading for Phobos, one of Mars's moons. The aim is to deploy the Idefix mini-rover on the surface, and for the very first time return samples from the Mars system to Earth.
In April, the researchers involved in the French-Chinese SVOM space mission presented an update on its initial findings. These provided a number of interesting insights into events that took place in the very earliest days of the Universe. CNRS News takes a...
The Ramses mission to asteroid Apophis is set to launch in 2028. It forms the cornerstone of a planetary defence programme designed to protect our planet from the risk of collision with near-Earth objects.
One hundred years after the death of the French astronomer and populariser of science Camille Flammarion, the CNRS physicist Jean-Philippe Uzan follows in the footsteps of his predecessor’s celebrated book Popular Astronomy, providing us with an accessible...
On 14 September, 2015, the international LIGO/Virgo collaboration detected the very first gravitational wave signal, a tiny distortion of spacetime predicted by Einstein, in this case produced by the...
Why is the outermost part of the Sun's atmosphere, the corona, so much hotter than its surface? Ten years after formulating a hypothesis based on a numerical model, CNRS researchers have now...
With large-scale observation campaigns, innovative data analysis methods and theoretical advances on all fronts, astrophysics and cosmology are entering a high-precision era with the potential to...