News Archive 2022 - 2019

2022/11/30

Small asteroids are probably young

The impact experiment conducted on the asteroid Ryugu by the Japanese Hayabusa2 mission which took place two years ago resulted in an unexpectedly large crater. With the use of simulations, a team led by the University of Bern and the National Center of Competence in Research (NCCR) PlanetS has recently succeeded in gaining new insights from the experiment regarding the formation and development of asteroids. These insights are also important for the DART mission of NASA.

2022/09/06

New CSH Directorate

Susanne Wampfler and Yann Alibert are the new Co-Directors of the CSH.

2022/05/04

ERC Consolidator Grant

Brice-Olivier Demory got awarded a Consolidator grant from the European Research Council (ERC). Because Switzerland is not associated to Horizon Europe for this call, the research project will be funded by the Swiss State Secretariat for Education, Research and Innovation (SERI).

2021/02/22

Susanne Wampfler named as CSH Deputy Director

Former CSH Fellow and astrochemist Prof. Dr. Susanne Wampfler has been named as the CSH Deputy Director effective 1st January 2021. She is the holder of a Swiss National Science Foundation Eccellenza Professorial Fellowship.

2020/12/17

A pair of lonely planet-like objects born like stars

An international research team led by Dr. Clémence Fontanive from the CSH has discovered an exotic binary system composed of two young planet-like objects, orbiting around each other from a very large distance. Although these objects look like giant exoplanets, they formed in the same way as stars, proving that the mechanisms driving star formation can produce rogue worlds in unusual systems deprived of a Sun.

2020

Ambizione Fellowship

Elspeth Lee has won an Ambizione Fellowship (2020), which will be hosted at the CSH. Dr. Lee comes to the CSH from the University of Oxford.

2020

Ambizione Fellowship

CSH Postdoc Niels Ligterink has won an SNF Ambizione Fellowship (2020), which will be hosted in the Space Research & Planetary Sciences (WP) Division of the Physics Institute within the University of Bern.

2020/01/16

Swiss Society for Astrophysics & Astronomy

The CSH is now an institutional member of the Swiss Society for Astrophysics & Astronomy (SSAA).

2020/01/10

Honorary Professorship at University of Warwick

Prof. Dr. Kevin Heng has been appointed a Honorary Professor in the Department of Physics at the University of Warwick with an initial appointment from 1st January 2020 to 31st December 2022. The CSH will seek to collaborate closely with its Centre for Exoplanets & Habitability.

2019/10/09

Liquifying a rocky exoplanet

A hot, molten Earth would be around 5% larger than its solid counterpart. This is the result of a study led by researchers at the University of Bern. The difference between molten and solid rocky planets is important for the search of Earth-like worlds beyond our Solar System and the understanding of Earth itself.