Institute of Astronomy

News and Press Releases

Stellar Stuff - Gaia Live in Schools

Published on 24/03/2014 

An IoA, Cambridge-led outreach project is connecting over 2,200 pupils with the excitement of ESA’s Gaia mission through a Q&A session that will take place tomorrow with the discussion streamed live to schools throughout Europe.

Will Gaia discover habitable planets similar to the Earth? Is the Universe infinite? Could Gaia be hit by a piece of space debris as in the film Gravity? How many planets are there in the Milky Way?

Galactic gas caused by colliding comets suggests mystery ‘shepherd’ exoplanet

Published on 06/03/2014 

Latest research has uncovered a massive clump of carbon monoxide in a young solar system. The gas is the result of near constant collisions of icy comets – suggesting vast swarms of tightly packed comets in thrall to the gravitational pull of an as-yet-unseen exoplanet.

Searching for new worlds with PLATO

Published on 20/02/2014 

Space eye with 34 telescopes will investigate one million stars

Gaia-ESO data suggest Milky Way may have formed ‘inside-out’, and provide new insights into Galactic evolution

Published on 19/01/2014 

Gaia-ESO data show Milky Way may have formed ‘inside-out’, and provide new insight into Galactic evolution

Research on first data release from Gaia-ESO project suggests the Milky Way formed by expanding out from the centre, and reveals new insights into the way our Galaxy was assembled.

Are a companion's comets a key to a curious exoplanet system?

Published on 17/12/2013 

The nearby star Fomalhaut A hosts the most famous planetary system outside our own Solar System, containing both an exoplanet and a spectacular ring of comets. Today, an international team of astronomers announced a new discovery with the Herschel Space Observatory that has made this system even more intriguing; the least massive star of the three in the Fomalhaut system, Fomalhaut C, has now been found to host its own comet belt. The researchers published their results today in a letter to the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.