E-ELT gets off the ground

On June 2014, an explosion disturbed the silence of the Acatama Desert in Chile. Part of the 3000-metre peak of Cerro Armazones was blasted away in order to prepare a level platform that will host ESO’s European Extremely Large Telescope [E-ELT], the largest optical/infrared telescope in the world.
The Atacama Desert is one of the favourite places for astronomers because of its exceptional conditions: the extremely arid mountain region, that is far away from any source of light pollution, offers a clear sky most of the time. This environment, chosen as the location for the future E-ELT, will also present new…

NIC-XII

The 13th International Symposium on Nuclei in the Cosmos [NIC-XIII] will be held in Debrecen, Hungary from 7-11 July 2014.

NIC-XII is part of a series of biennal conferences addressed to nuclear physicists, astrophysicists, cosmochemists to survey the recent achievements in nuclear astrophysics.

The NIC-XIII program will cover in particular the following topics: cosmology and big bang nucleosynthesis…

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Planck results: Universe older, slower and still challenging

On 21 March 2013, ESA’s Planck satellite revealed the most detailed map ever created of the cosmic microwave background [CMB], the relic radiation from the Big Bang. The results from Planck’s new map provided an excellent confirmation of the standard model of cosmology with unprecedented accuracy. However, the existence of unexplained features may challenge the foundations of the current understanding of the Universe.

According to the Big Bang theory, the Universe rapidly expanded from extremely hot and dense plasma of photons…