Press Releases
November 2009
30 November 2009 - ESRF
Kick-off for new "nano-friendly" and ecological Upgrade Programme buildings
The signature of a contract between the ESRF and the engineering company Ginger Sechaut Bossuyt on 27 November marks the beginning of the study phase and the subsequent construction works to implement the ambitious Upgrade Programme. The extension of the experimental hall by 18,000 m2 will allow housing up to 13 modernised existing beamlines, including seven new upgrade beamlines (out of a total of eight upgrade beamline projects).
30 November 2009 - CERN
LHC sets new world record
CERN1’s Large Hadron Collider has today become the world’s highest energy particle accelerator, having accelerated its twin beams of protons to an energy of 1.18 TeV in the early hours of the morning.
30 November 2009 - ESO
Black Hole Caught Zapping Galaxy into Existence?
Which come first, the supermassive black holes that frantically devour matter or the enormous galaxies where they reside? A brand new scenario has emerged from a recent set of outstanding observations of a black hole without a home: black holes may be “building” their own host galaxy. This could be the long-sought missing link to understanding why the masses of black holes are larger in galaxies that contain more stars.
26 November 2009 - EMBL
First-ever blueprint of a minimal cell is more complex than expected
What are the bare essentials of life, the indispensable ingredients required to produce a cell that can survive on its own? Can we describe the molecular anatomy of a cell, and understand how an entire organism functions as a system? These are just some of the questions that scientists in a partnership between the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Heidelberg, Germany, and the Centre de Regulacio Genòmica (CRG) in Barcelona, Spain, set out to address.
25 November 2009 - ESO
Cosmic "Dig" Reveals Vestiges of the Milky Way's Building Blocks
Peering through the thick dust clouds of our galaxy’s "bulge" (the myriads of stars surrounding its centre), and revealing an amazing amount of detail, a team of astronomers has unveiled an unusual mix of stars in the stellar grouping known as Terzan 5. Never observed anywhere in the bulge before, this peculiar "cocktail" of stars suggests that Terzan 5 is in fact one of the bulge's primordial building blocks, most likely the relic of a proto-galaxy that merged with the Milky Way during its very early days.
23 November 2009 - CERN
Two circulating beams bring first collisions in the LHC
Today the LHC circulated two beams simultaneously for the first time, allowing the operators to test the synchronization of the beams and giving the experiments their first chance to look for proton-proton collisions.
20 November 2009 - ESO
Watching a Cannibal Galaxy Dine
A new technique using near-infrared images, obtained with ESO’s 3.58-metre New Technology Telescope (NTT), allows astronomers to see through the opaque dust lanes of the giant cannibal galaxy Centaurus A, unveiling its “last meal” in unprecedented detail - a smaller spiral galaxy, currently twisted and warped. This amazing image also shows thousands of star clusters, strewn like glittering gems, churning inside Centaurus A.
17 November 2009 - ESO
Ticking Stellar Time Bomb Identified
Using ESO’s Very Large Telescope and its ability to obtain images as sharp as if taken from space, astronomers have made the first time-lapse movie of a rather unusual shell ejected by a “vampire star”, which in November 2000 underwent an outburst after gulping down part of its companion’s matter. This enabled astronomers to determine the distance and intrinsic brightness of the outbursting object. It appears that this double star system is a prime candidate to be one of the long-sought progenitors of the exploding stars known as Type Ia supernovae, critical for studies of dark energy.
11 November 2009 - ESO
Exoplanets Clue to Sun's Curious Chemistry
A ground-breaking census of 500 stars, 70 of which are known to host planets, has successfully linked the long-standing “lithium mystery” observed in the Sun to the presence of planetary systems. Using ESO’s successful HARPS spectrograph, a team of astronomers has found that Sun-like stars that host planets have destroyed their lithium much more efficiently than “planet-free” stars. This finding does not only shed light on the lack of lithium in our star, but also provides astronomers with a very efficient way of finding stars with planetary systems.
8 November 2009 - EMBL
Drought resistance explained
Scientists at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Grenoble, France, and the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientificas (CSIC) in Valencia, Spain discovered that the key to plants' responses to drought lies in the structure of a protein called PYR1 and how it interacts with the plant hormone abscisic acid (ABA).
4 November 2009 - EMBL
Deciphering the regulatory code
Thanks to scientists at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Heidelberg, Germany, it is now possible to accurately predict when and where different CRMs will be active.
3 November 2009 - ESO
Shedding Light on the Cosmic Skeleton
Astronomers have tracked down a gigantic, previously unknown assembly of galaxies located almost seven billion light-years away from us. The discovery, made possible by combining two of the most powerful ground-based telescopes in the world, is the first observation of such a prominent galaxy structure in the distant Universe, providing further insight into the cosmic web and how it formed.