The Sun is a star that formed 4.6 billion years ago in our Milky Way Galaxy. It is the largest and most massive object in our Solar System, whose energy enables life on our planet. What happened at the time of its birth? Was its formation similar to most stars in our Galaxy, or did it form in special circumstances? ERC grantee Maria Lugaro at the Konkoly Observatory in Budapest seeks to answer these questions by investigating the Solar System’s chemical origin. Her discoveries could help untangle the secrets of stars' potential to harbour Earth-like planets, and ultimately life.
Cancelled flights, and less commercial and industrial activity during lockdown are reducing air and light pollution around the world, leading to spectacular views of the night sky. To mark this year’s International Dark Sky Week, we bring you the story of ERC grantee Minna Palmroth who, together with a group of Finnish amateur stargazers, has discovered a new kind of northern lights.
There is a web of filaments – essentially long strands of gas – that connects all the galaxies in the universe. This is known as the Cosmic Web and, so far, astrophysicist had only a partial idea of what it may have looked like. Now, ERC funded astronomer Michele Fumagalli, and his collaborators from the University of Durham and the RIKEN Cluster for Pioneering Research in Japan, are able to show the stunning images of this common thread that runs through our stars.
Water vapour has been detected in the atmosphere of a remote planet with habitable temperatures. Two ERC grantees at the University College London (UCL) were among the coauthors of study.
On a clear summer night, look up to the sky and what do you see? Ordinary matter such as planets, stars maybe even an asteroid. Millions of little specks, as far as the eyes can reach. This ordinary matter, also known as baryonic matter, is the primary observable component of our universe. But is what we see all that is out there?
With a diameter of around 143,000 kilometres and a mass 300 times that of the Earth, Jupiter is the largest planet in the solar system. Scientists have debated for decades how such giants formed. Now, astrophysicists of Universities of Bern and Zürich and of ETH Zürich, amongst which are ERC grantees Yann Alibert and Maria Schönbächler, proposed a solution to this puzzle. The research results, published recently in the magazine Nature Astronomy, provide crucial hints to long-standing questions about the formation of other planets in the solar system and beyond.
Group theory, functional analysis and ergodic theory – three distinct areas of mathematics that meet within the theory of von Neumann algebras. The RIGIDITY project, funded by the ERC, aims to classify families of von Neumann algebras.
Understanding complex structures means separating irrelevant information to get to something simpler and easier to understand. When you look at something from a distance – although you don’t see all the details, you can still describe what you see. ERC grantee Balázs Szegedy has developed several mathematical tools for providing a compressed yet useful view of complex structures.
How does one infer the dynamics of a DNA minicircle in solution? How does one align the neuronal firing patterns of several neurons across individuals? These questions are intrinsically statistical, but nevertheless escape the traditional tools of statistics. The ComplexData project investigated such questions from a mathematical and an applied context.
