Astronomy & Astrophysics (A&A)

2019

News

Details: Published on 05 October 2021

Dear Colleagues,

The success of the A&A journal brings with it a rapid growth in the number of articles and pages which we have to process in production.

As a consequence of this success and to keep down production costs, we have decided to typeset the Appendices as camera-ready material. This means that our publisher (EDP Sciences) will no longer modify the Latex layout of the appendices.

However, some cases, such as an Appendix starting with a title followed by a blank page, still need to be handled, and we then have to ask you a small extra effort. As many of these issues are recurring ones that we have identified, or are in the process of identifying, we have produced a short document to guide you through these changes.

Sincerely,
Thierry Forveille (Editor in Chief), David Elbaz (Managing Editor)

Details: Published on 30 September 2021

The Board of Directors of A&A attributes two yearly awards for outstanding research published in A&A by individuals in the initial stages of their careers. With these two awards, the Board wishes to express its appreciation, and contribute to the enthusiasm, of the new generation of researchers who will be shaping astronomy for the decades to come.

PhD prize

Miriam Keppler

After undergraduate studies at Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich, Miriam Keppler moved to MPIA in Heidelberg, where she completed both her master’s degree, which included an ERASMUS year in Grenoble, and her PhD, and where she is now a postdoc. She is probably best known for her discovery of a (proto)planet in a gap of a protoplanetary disk, which is the first such detection and something that planetary astronomers had been seeking for a long time. Protoplanetary disks and planets have both been imaged for over a decade, and gravitational interaction with an embedded planet has always been one leading explanation for the gaps that are observed in some of those disks, but Miriam Keppler's 2018 A&A paper first closed this loop by finding an uncontroverted observational example. Miriam Keppler has since built on this work by characterizing both disks, through ALMA and near-IR high contrast imaging, and planets, through near-IR spectrophotometry. The broad scope of her work is impressive for someone who completed her PhD less than a year ago and bodes very well for her future career.

Early career prize

Joanna Drazkowska

After undergraduate studies and a master’s degree at the Copernicus University in Torun, Joanna Drazkowska moved to the Institute for Theoretical Astronomy in Heidelberg for her PhD, and she has since been a postdoc, first at the Institute for Computational Science in Zurich and now at Ludwig-Maximilians University in Munich. Her work is on the theoretical side of planet formation in protoplanetary disks; she develops models of the growth of the solid phase from micron-size dust grains to Earth-size (and larger) planets. The 2016 A&A article for which she is receiving the A&A early career award is a milestone in that field as it was the first to overcome the fragmentation barrier, or meter-size barrier, which had blocked all previous planet formation models. Joanna Drazkowska showed that the "traffic-jam effect" (a local drop in the radial speed of the particles) that results from the radial drift of the solids can locally enhance the solid/gas density ratio to the point where planetesimals can form via a particle-gas hydrodynamical effect known as streaming instability, hence removing the previous decimeter limit to growth. This trailblazing study triggered many follow-up studies on mechanisms for dust pileup, both by Joanna Drazkowska and her collaborators and by others, and has been extremely influential.

Details: Published on 23 June 2021

The winners of the first edition of the A&A awards for "Best PhD Thesis" and "Early Career" will be announced very soon!

The ceremony will take place during the Opening Ceremony of European Astronomical Society (EAS) Annual Meeting (https://eas.unige.ch/EAS2021/) on Monday 28 June, at 14:20. https://eas.kuoni-congress.info/2021/programme/

Details: Published on 14 December 2020

On the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics (A&A), the Board of Directors of A&A is establishing two awards for outstanding research published in A&A by individuals in the initial stages of their careers. With these awards, the Board wishes to express its appreciation, and contribute to the enthusiasm, of the new generation of researchers who will be shaping astronomy for the decades to come.

Details: Published on 08 October 2020

The 2020 Nobel Prize in physics has been awarded to astronomers Reinhard Genzel and Andrea Ghez for their parallel discoveries of the supermassive compact object at the center of our Galaxy, and to mathematical physicist Roger Penrose for his theoretical work on black holes.

Over the past 30 years, the teams led by Genzel and Ghez have used telescopes in Chile and Hawaii, respectively, to track the orbits of stars around the very center of the Milky Way. This has shown that its central ~100 astronomical units contain 4 million solar masses and yet have very low luminosity; this result is extremely hard to explain with anything but a black hole. Recently, Reinhard Genzel's team spearheaded the development of the GRAVITY instrument for the Very Large Telescope Interferometer to improve the tracking precision of the Galactic center stars by an order of magnitude. In a series of A&A articles, the team used the exquisite GRAVITY measurements to pinpoint the properties of the central mass, measure the variable gravitational redshift it inflicts on passing stars, observe the Schwarzschild precession of their orbits, and measure the motions of gas clouds near the last stable orbit.

A&A warmly congratulates all three recipients of the prize, and thanks Reinhard Genzel and the GRAVITY team for choosing our journal to present their spectacular results. A very nice summary of those results, presented by GRAVITY team member Guy Perrin at the 50th anniversary celebration of A&A, can be viewed on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SkQCauze-A8.

Details: Published on 30 September 2020

Astronomy & Astrophysics, published by EDP Sciences, presents a series of articles on the Solar Orbiter space mission and its ten instruments.

Solar Orbiter, an ESA-NASA collaboration, was launched on February 10, 2020. It carries the most comprehensive payload flown in the inner heliosphere to date, with six remote-sensing instruments that image the Sun and its surroundings as well as four in situ instruments for monitoring the immediate environment of the spacecraft. A series of Venus and Earth gravity assists will adjust the probe’s perihelion to a minimum of 0.28 AU and raise the inclination of the orbital plane to over 33 degrees. This will allow the first-ever look at the solar poles. Thus, Solar Orbiter is the conceptual combination of two missions: an out-of-ecliptic in situ probe (like Ulysses) and one that brings state-of-the-art telescopes (which are an improvement over those of, e.g., SOHO and SDO) closer to the Sun than ever before as well as over the solar poles. Solar Orbiter will address the most pressing open questions of solar physics, and its results will remain unique for at least the next decade.

All calibrated science data will be made available three months after their reception on the ground, in line with the open-data philosophy of the mission. This publication is coordinated with the release of the first data from the four in situ instruments through the public ESA Solar Orbiter archive. This special feature was coordinated by Yannis Zouganelis and the Solar Orbiter teams.

To read the Solar Orbiter mission special issue, please click here.

Details: Published on 15 September 2020

We are delighted to announce that Françoise Combes, one of the associate editors of Astronomy & Astrophysics, has been awarded the CNRS 2020 Gold Medal. Françoise is a professor at the Collège de France and hold its chair in “Galaxies and Cosmology”. She is also an astrophysicist at the Paris Observatory and a member of the French Academy of Sciences.

This is a significant achievement. Not only does the CNRS, the French research agency, only award one Gold Medal a year across all academic fields, but, apart from the physicists Alain Brillet et Thibault Damour who received the Gold Medal for their contribution to the detection of gravitational waves in 2017, the last recipient in astronomy was Evry Schatzman in 1983. Previous Gold Medal recipients include most post-1950 French Nobel Prize laureates, so there is every reason to extend our congratulations for this very special moment.

This Gold Medal builds on the CNRS Silver Medal Françoise received in 2001. She has been an associate editor of Astronomy & Astrophysics since 2003, so it is our great honour and pleasure to work closely with Françoise on one of the leading original research journals in its field.

Read the CNRS article “The astrophysicist Françoise Combes receives the CNRS 2020 Gold Medal” or read the CNRS press release.

Details: Published on 14 September 2020

Astronomy & Astrophysics, published by EDP Sciences, has published a special feature on the results from the ESA Planck mission, based on data released by ESA and the Planck Collaboration in July 2018.

This 2018 data release has significantly lower systematic residuals for both Planck instruments, LFI and HFI, and a more accurate photometric calibration for HFI. These calibration improvements are most significant over the largest angular scales and for the polarized emission. The resulting frequency maps were used to separate the diffuse sky emission into maps of the cosmic microwave background, the thermal Sunyaev-Zeldovich effect, the cosmic infrared background, and the Galactic thermal dust, carbon monoxide, anomalous dust, free-free, and synchrotron emission.

The 12 articles in the special issue describe the released data products and present scientific results extracted by the Planck Collaboration from this data. The six-parameter ΛCDM model continues to provide an excellent fit to the cosmic microwave background data at high and low redshift. Planck measures five of those six parameters to better than 1%, and together with external datasets, sets tight limits to many possible extensions of the model. Beyond those immediate results, the Planck 2018 dataset constitutes an essential treasure trove and will have lasting importance for both cosmology and foreground astrophysics. This special feature was coordinated by Jan Tauber and the Planck Science Team.

To read the Planck 2018 results special issue, please click here.

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