Research Highlights

With the help of the James Webb Space Telescope, a team of researchers including members from the Institute for Particle Physics and Astrophysics at ETH Zurich measured ammonia in the atmosphere of a cold brown dwarf, showing that the isotopic abundance of ammonia can be used to study how giant gas planets form.

A complex research experiment lasting several years shows that the electric dipole moment of the neutron is significantly smaller than previously assumed. It has thus become less likely that the existence of matter in the universe can be explained by precisely this dipole moment.

A team of physicists and computer scientists at ETH Zurich has developed a new approach to the problem of dark matter and dark energy in the universe. Using machine learning tools, they programmed computers to teach themselves how to extract the relevant information from maps of the universe.

Astrophysicists of the University of Zürich and ETH Zürich show how the icy moons of Uranus were born. Their result suggests that such potentially habitable worlds are much more abundant in the Universe than previously thought.

Young giant planets are born from gas and dust. Researchers of ETH Zürich and the Universities of Zürich and Bern simulated different scenarios relying on the computing power of the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre (CSCS) to find out how they exactly form and evolve.

ETH researchers studying how stars are formed in distant galaxies have made an unexpected discovery: a correlation that exists today between the proportion of heavy chemical elements in a galaxy and the rate at which new stars are formed in this galaxy did not apply 10 billion years ago. This observation helps scientists understand how galaxies with their stars and planets were formed over billions of years.

A research team has observed structures racing out from the centre of a young star's debris disk at high speeds. It is still unclear what causes the phenomenon.

Black holes can be found at the centres of most galaxies. Most have little mass compared with their host galaxy. ETH researchers, however, have discovered a particularly massive black hole, which clearly grew so quickly that the host galaxy was not able to keep pace. This calls into question previous thinking on the co-evolution of galaxies and their central black holes.

Astronomers at ETH Zurich have confirmed the existence of a young giant gas planet still embedded in the midst of the disk of gas and dust surrounding its parent star. For the first time, scientists are able to directly study the formation of a planet at a very early stage.

Active galactic nuclei are the brightest objects in the universe. They are not lit up permanently, but rather ‘flicker’ extremely slowly. This insight helps ETH researchers better understand the influence these nuclei and black holes have on their host galaxy.

Two years ago, an international research collaboration set out to investigate the mysterious dark matter and dark energy in our universe. Now an ETH postdoctoral researcher has co-led a publication presenting the exciting first results. ETH professor Alexandre Refregier explains why this publication will have a high impact and whether it proves Albert Einstein wrong.

An international team of researchers has discovered something extraordinary in space: a new star system forming from parts of a filamentary gas cloud.