SPECIAL - June 2011
An exceptionally X-ray luminous and massive galaxy cluster was detected by Planck and confirmed by XMM-Newton More details can be found in this paper

 

PLANCK EARLY RESULTS 2011
A set of papers describing the scientific performance of the Planck payload and presenting results regarding difuse emission and sources included in the Early Release Compact Source Catalogue can be found here

 

SPECIAL - May 14th 2009
The launch of Planck/Herschel was successful!

At 16:37 (Romanian time) at 1140km away from the African coast, the two sattelites have separated, saying good bye to Ariane 5.

Now, Planck is in L2 and the telemetry works perfect! We expect the first relevant meassurements in approximately 6 months.

You can watch the launch movie directly on our web page

 

May 2009
Planck sattelite is scheduled to be launched on May 14th

Planck is a mission of the European Space Agency. It will measure, with unprecedented accuracy and level of detail the cosmic microwave background radiation (CMB) anisotropies which encode a wealth of information on the properties of the Universe in its infancy

The Cosmology Group is directly involved in this mission and our work is a contribution to Planck's scientific objectives.
Dr. Lucia Popa is a member of the Core Team of the mission and was a part of the experiment ever since its proposal stage.

More information about the launch you can find on ESA home page <

 

May 2008
Laurentiu Caramete successfully presented the Romanian Virtual Observatory initiative  and our group's intention to create specific VO tools for cosmology (especially for helping PLANCK Mission) and astroparticle physics  at the IVOA Interoperability meeting, Trieste, Italy.  Thus, we obtained the full support of the IVOA .

Follwing the same meeting Laurentiu Caramete also became representative of the ISS in the proposal team for a new international infrastructure project regarding astroparticle physics in the VO

 

March 2008

The WMAP Five-year data have been released on March 5th 2008!!

 
January 2008
Our group has recently extended its research interests to galactic and extragalactic magnetic fields and statistics of galaxies.
We also started a project for creating a national Virtual Observatory in Romania (RoVO)
 
November 2007
Lucia Popa and Ana Vasile was awarded with the CNCSIS prize for the article Constraints on non-thermal Dark Matter from Planck lensing extraction