Astronomy

Renowned planetary researcher and Nobel laureate Didier Queloz is moving to ETH Zurich, where he will be joining with other professors to study the origins of life in a new centre.

Uranus and Neptune both have a completely skewed magnetic field, perhaps due to the planets’ special inner structures. But new experiments by ETH Zurich researchers now show that the mystery remains unsolved.

Using the extinct niobium-92 atom, ETH researchers have been able to date events in the early solar system with greater precision than before. The study concludes that supernova explosions must have taken place in the birth environment of our sun.

Phobos and Deimos are the remains of a larger Martian moon that was disrupted between 1 and 2.7 billion years ago, say researchers from the Institute of Geophysics at ETH Zurich and the Physics Institute at the University of Zurich. They reached this conclusion using computer simulations and seismic recordings from the InSight Mars mission.

An international research team with members from ETH has developed a new method for directly imaging smaller planets in the habitable zone of a neighbouring star system. This opens up new possibilities in the search for extraterrestrial life.

Why is gravity the most mysterious force of nature? Lavinia Heisenberg studies how the universe was formed, and how it is changing. She has now been awarded the ETH Zurich Latsis Prize for her outstanding achievements in the field of theoretical physics.