Read article 'Gamma-ray bursts are a real threat to life'
A new study confirms the potential hazard of nearby gamma-ray bursts (GRBs), and quantifies the probability of an event on Earth and more generally in the Milky Way and other galaxies. The authors fin...
Read article 'Ultra-luminous X-ray source is ‘just’ a pulsar'
Until now, ultra-luminous X-ray sources (ULXs) were thought to be black holes, because their high luminosity implied a mass exceeding by far the maximal mass of a neutron star. The most luminous of th...
Read article 'Cosmic particles meet the LHC at ISVHECRI'
More than 120 physicists from across the world met at CERN to discuss questions related to hadron production in cosmic-ray interactions and at accelerator experiments.
Read article 'AMS finds evidence of new source of positrons in cosmic rays'
The Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS) on the International Space Station (ISS) has new results on energetic cosmic-ray electrons and positrons, based on analysis of the first 41 billion events.
Read article 'Planck confirms doubts on BICEP2 results'
The Planck collaboration has published an all-sky map of the polarized thermal emission of dust grains in the Milky Way. It shows that the field used by the experiment for Background Imaging of Cosmic...
Read article 'Borexino measures the Sun’s energy in real time'
The Borexino experiment at the INFN Gran Sasso National Laboratories has measured the energy of the Sun in real time, showing for the first time that the energy released today at its centre is exactly...
Read article 'INTEGRAL catches radioactivity of a supernova'
ESA’s INTEGRAL satellite has detected gamma-ray lines from the radioactive decay of nickel and cobalt in a nearby supernova of type Ia. This unprecedented result confirms that the intense l...
Read article 'Study hints at cosmic-ray ‘hotspot’'
The distribution of ultra-high-energy cosmic rays (UHECR) recorded by the Telescope Array (TA) in the northern sky is displaying an intriguing “hotspot” in the direction of the Ursa Major ...
Read article 'Do X-rays reveal a sterile neutrino?'
A detailed study of galaxy clusters using NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and ESA’s XMM-Newton has found a mysterious X-ray signal. One intriguing possibility is that the X-rays are produ...
Read article 'An Introduction to Birth, Evolution and Death of Stars'
How stars form from interstellar matter, how they evolve and die, was understood only relatively recently. All of these aspects are covered in this book by Lequeux, who directed the Marseilles observa...
