The Exoplanets and Origins of Life research group focuses on the:
We have a new PhD position available. Applications are welcome at the following link:
Interdisciplinary PhD position in space sciences and cancer research
From 7 to 17 November 2024, a team of researchers and science educators from the University of Bern and the University in Marrakech will be travelling to Morocco to visit primary and secondary schools in remote areas of Morocco to teach astronomy.
Erik successfully defended his PhD thesis on 24 September 2024, he is now moving to Oxford to pursue his work on rocky exoplanets with a SNF Postdoc Mobility grant. Congratulations !
Using JWST, researchers from our team have contributed to the possible detection of an atmosphere surrounding 55 Cancri e, a rocky exoplanet 41 light-years from Earth. This is the best evidence to date for a rocky planet atmosphere outside our solar system.
Our team has been awarded a SPIRIT grant to keep the SAINT-EX Observatory's performance at its best, in partnership with UNAM (Mexico).
Astronomical observations from ground-based telescopes are sensitive to local atmospheric conditions. SAINT-EX group members show that anthropogenic climate change will negatively affect some of these conditions at observation sites around the globe.
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).
The SAINT-EX team led the discovery of a sub-Neptune exoplanet on a highly-eccentric orbit around a cool star. The SAINT-EX telescope provided critical data to pinpoint the planet's physical and orbital properties.
Our team has detected a key molecular property of all living organisms from a helicopter flying at high speed and several kilometers above ground. The measurement technology could open up opportunities for remote sensing of the Earth and the search for living organisms in our Solar System.
The BrainPol project (co-led by the SAINT-EX group), which aims at diagnosing and staging brain cancer non-invasively, is based on an instrument initially built to search for life beyond the Earth.
The TRAPPIST-1 system has been co-discovered by members of the SAINT-EX team in 2016. We also played a key role in refining the planet masses and sizes. Five years later we now have reached unprecedented accuracy on the physical parameters of these temperate Earth-sized exoplanets.
The MERMOZ project, led by the SAINT-EX team, has been advertised in the Oct/Nov 2020 issue of the specialist magazine "Ciel & Espace".
The “SAINT-EX” Observatory, led by scientists from the eponymous group, has detected two exoplanets orbiting the star TOI-1266. The Mexico-based telescope thus demonstrates its high precision and takes an important step in the quest of finding potentially habitable worlds.
Where few thought to look, the NCCR PlanetS co-funded telescope "SAINT-EX" is searching for new worlds. After a year of operation, the project has brought some exciting first results.
SAINT-EX recently detected a pass of the CHEOPS satellite while it was overflying Mexico at dawn, slightly before sunrise. These data enabled us to estimate the Vmag at 8.4, which leaves no imprint to the night sky as seen by the naked eye.
Our team was in Mexico in the past two months to install and test our robotic observatory SAINT-EX. Science operations will start in February 2019.
A new paper led by members of the SAINT-EX group is providing the most precise calculations so far of the masses of the seven planets around the star TRAPPIST-1. From this, new findings are emerging about their density and composition: All TRAPPIST-1 planets consist primarily of rock and contain up to five percent water. This is a decisive step for determining the habitability of these planets.
After 60 hours of non-stop work, members of the SAINT-EX team reached their hoped-for goal: They were the first to measure the orbital period for the outermost planet of the famous TRAPPIST-1 system which made headlines worldwide. The new result confirms that the seven Earth-size planets around the ultra-cool dwarf are lined up in a chain with resonances linking every member.
An international team of astronomers has discovered a compact analogue of our inner solar system about 40 light-years away. Members of the SAINT-EX team analysed the data collected with NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope and calculated that the newly detected exoplanets all have masses less or similar to the Earth.
Observations from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope have led to the first temperature map of a super-Earth planet -- a rocky planet nearly two times as big as ours. The map reveals extreme temperature swings from one side of the planet to the other, and hints that a possible reason for this is the presence of lava flows.
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