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Witnessing the Formation of Moons

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Circumplanetary Disk: An artistic rendering of a dust and gas disk encircling the young exoplanet "CT Cha b", 625 light-years from Earth. The planet appears at lower right, while its host star and surrounding circumstellar disk are visible in the background. (Illustration: NASA; ESA; CSA; STScI; Gabriele Cugno, University of Zurich, NCCR PlanetS; Sierra Grant, Carnegie Institution for Science; Joseph Olmsted, STScI; Leah Hustak, STScI)

NASA's Webb Telescope is investigating the formation of moons around a massive planet. A team at UZH is using the data to study the chemical composition of a disc that is believed to be the basis for the formation of new moons.

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Largest-Ever Cosmological Simulation

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Image extracted from the Euclid Flagship simulations catalogue. Each dot represents a galaxy: blue points mark galaxies at the centers of dark matter clumps, while red points denote satellites within them. (Image: Jorge Carretero & Pau Tallada, Port d’Informació Científica / Euclid Consortium)

The consortium running the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Euclid mission has published the most extensive simulation of the cosmos to date. The modeling was based on algorithms developed by UZH professor Joachim Stadel.

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Young Star Clusters Give Birth to Rogue Planetary-Mass Objects

How do rogue planetary-mass objects – celestial bodies with masses between stars and planets – form? An international team of astronomers, including the University of Zurich, has used advanced simulations to show that these enigmatic objects are linked to the chaotic dynamics of young star clusters.

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Using Small Black Holes To Detect Big Black Holes

An international team of astrophysicists with participation of the University of Zurich proposes a novel method to detect pairs of the biggest black holes found at the centers of galaxies by analyzing gravitational waves generated by binaries of nearby small stellar black holes.

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EuroHPC Extreme Scale Access Award

Florina Ciorba, Professor of High Performance Computing at the University of Basel, Lucio Mayer, Professor of Astrophysics at the University of Zurich, and Rubén Cabezón, Senior Scientist at the computing center (sciCORE) of the University of Basel. Photo from www.cscs.ch

Prof. Lucio Mayer is a PI of a European project that gained his team and his collaborators at UniBasel a EuroHPC Extreme Scale Access Award. This is the largest ever supercomputig allocation granted in Europe to a science project across all disciplines. The team will use it to deploy 22 million GPUs hours on the Lumi Supercomputer in Finland, the third fastest in the world, to run state-of-the-art simulations of how stars form. Read more:
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GEORGE LAKE TECHNOLOGY INNOVATION AWARD

GEORGE LAKE AWARD

This November, the first round of applications to the new George Lake Award are expected. The new award was created by the Merac Foundation in collaboration with our current Director Lucio Mayer to honour the memory of ICS founding Director George Lake, to foster novel developments and ideas in instruments, computer simulations and data analysis/AI for astrophysics and cosmology.

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