2014 News

For the first time, an international team of astronomers has revealed the dramatic ‘blow out’ phase of galactic evolution. The astronomers discovered dense gas being blasted out of a compact galaxy (called SDSS J0905+57) at speeds of up to two million miles per hour. The gas is being driven to distances of tens of thousands of light years by the intense pressure exerted on it by the radiation of stars that are forming rapidly at the galaxy’s centre.

Observations of the infant Universe have shown that the most distant galaxies discovered so far host black holes that are extremely massive, characterized by thousand of billions solar masses. These objects, known with the name of “quasars” are generally discovered through the intense X-ray radiation they emit. The mechanism responsible for the formation of these black holes is still not known. To unveil this mystery...

An international research group from LAB (CNRS / University of Bordeaux), IPAG (CNRS / Université Joseph Fourier Grenoble) and IRAM (CNRS / MPG / IGN), led the most accurate study to date, to observe the distribution of dust and gas in a multiple-star system called GG Tau-A.

Watch a video about the construction of the 1st NOEMA antenna commented by NOEMA station manager Bertrand Gautier. Welcome to the Plateau de Bure, unique plateau in Europe at 2550 meters above sea level...

The Plateau de Bure Observatory seen from the sky - a video documentation by DiVertiCimes

With the official inauguration of the first of six planned NOEMA antennas on 22 September, IRAM is taking a crucial step towards one of the largest Franco-German projects in astronomy: the expansion of the Plateau de Bure observatory in the French Alps into the most powerful and most sensitive millimetre radio telescope in the northern hemisphere. The scientists are hoping that this state of the art observatory will provide answers to questions about our origins and the formation of the universe...

We are very pleased to announce the official inauguration of the first antenna of NOEMA, one of the biggest astronomical research projects in Europe! Read more about the programm here...

We are very pleased to announce the official inauguration of the first antenna of NOEMA, one of the biggest astronomical research projects in Europe! The inauguration will take place on September 22, 2014 at the IRAM Headquarters in presence of..

On July 9, 2014, Prof. Dr.-Ing. Peter Mezger passed away at the age of 85, after a long illness. As a director of the Max-Planck-Institute for Radio Astronomy in Bonn, Peter Mezger was a key figure during the creation and throughout the first 15 years of IRAM. His close relations with the French radio astronomy community allowed the French and German groups to find the mutual understanding and direct exchange necessary for the setup of such a complex co-operation.

L'origine du rayonnement cosmique, découvert en 1912 par Victor Hess, reste en grande partie mystérieuse. Une méthode d’observation originale pour ce domaine de l’astrophysique, a été utilisée par une équipe de chercheurs. À l'aide du radiotélescope de 30m de l'IRAM, ils ont détecté, dans les nuages moléculaires voisins irradiés par la supernova W28, la signature laissée par des particules de relativement basse énergie (500 MeV) produites dans le choc associé à l'explosion de la supernova. En particulier...

IRAM congratulates Rafael Bachiller (OAN, Spain) and Bertrand Lefloch (IPAG, France), the winners of the SEA-SF2A prize 2014 for outstanding achievements in a French-Spanish scientific research cooperation.

One of the central issues in understanding how stars form is how the massive clouds of gas and dust in which stars form fragment to produce the the direct progenitors of individual stars. An international team of astronomers has used the 30m telescope of the Institut de Radioastronomie Millimétrique in Spain in order to shed new light on this long-standing issue for stars more than 10 times the mass of our Sun.