Homepage of the International Space Science Institute (ISSI) located in Bern, Switzerland
ISSI is a scientifically independent and neutral Space- and Earth Science institute that advances science by facilitating open multi-disciplinary discourse in a stimulating environment, reaching out towards new scientific horizons.
We have previously expressed ISSI’s concern about the invasion of Ukraine and the resulting humanitarian crisis. The need to maintain science as a platform for dialogue even in times of conflict has become more prominent. As this war continues and other tensions rise around the world, it seems more important than ever to maintain institutions where such peaceful and constructive dialogue can take place. Science is a universal language that knows no geographical or political boundaries, nor boundaries related to race, gender or sexual orientation.
ISSI provides an open and neutral environment where such open and free discussions about Space and Earth Science, and related fields can take place. Dialogue between scientists promotes not only better science, but also a better mutual understanding among people of different origins and cultures. At ISSI we like to think of this as our own small contribution to a better world.
The Team at ISSI and Willy Benz, chair of the Board of Trustees
Giant planets and brown dwarfs at an orbital separation great than 5 AU are important puzzle pieces needed for constraining the uncertainties that exist in giant planet formation and evolutionary models that are plagued by a lack of observational constraints. In order to observationally probe this mass-separation parameter space, direct imaging is necessary but faces the difficulty of low detection efficiency. To utilize the power of direct imaging, pre-selecting companion candidates with long-period radial velocities, coupled with astrometry from Hipparcos and Gaia, provide a powerful tool to hunt for the most promising candidates for direct imaging. Not only does this increase the detection efficiency, but this wealth of information removes the degeneracy of unknown orbital parameters, leading to derived dynamical masses which can serve as benchmark objects to test models of formation and evolution. With the recently launched JWST, as well as upcoming facilities like the ELT and the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, observing time is valuable and the strategy of direct imaging needs to be re-defined to pre-select targets and characterize the companions that we do discover.
Emily Rickman is a Science Operations Scientist for the European Space Agency (ESA) based at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland. Emily Rickman is a member of the Hubble Space Telescope team providing support to the STIS instrument as well as a project-level member of the JWST Telescope Scientist Team for coronagraphy, and the JWST High-Contrast Imaging ERS Team. Emily Rickman earned her doctorate in Astronomy and Astrophysics from Geneva Observatory in 2020, where she also spent some time as a postdoctoral researcher. She was then awarded a fellowship with the European Space Agency at STScI. Prior to earning her PhD, Emily Rickman graduated from the University of Sheffield with a first-class Masters degree with honors in Physics and Astrophysics, including spending one year as a researcher at the Australian National University.
This workshop will focus on the economics and governance of commercialisation in outer space. It will look at the applicability of economic concepts, the concepts of international economic law, and the concepts of economic governance to space-based commerce.
The goal of the workshop is twofold. The first goal is identifying promising areas for future research along the lines outlined above, specifically a cross-disciplinary mix of economics, law, political science, and applied natural science. The second goal is to enlist interested researchers in setting up a research and workshop agenda and loose organizational/coordinating structure (a researcher network) based on the areas identified.
The workshop will be hosted jointly by the World Trade Institute (WTI) and the International Space Science Institute.
Submission Guidelines: Please submit paper proposals on original and unpublished research related to this call for papers. Abstract submissions must be between 300-500 words in length and should be accompanied by a short CV.
To submit your proposals, for further details, or to express interest, please contact Sophia Thompson, sophia.thompson@wti.org.
Deadline for abstracts: 15 September 2023.
Accepted authors will be notified by 15 October 2023.
The International Space Science Institute (ISSI) in Bern, Switzerland invites applications for the Johannes Geiss Fellowship (JGF). With this fellowship ISSI honors the memory of Johannes Geiss, the founder of ISSI, and his contributions to the space sciences.
The fellowship was established in 2015 to attract internationally renowned scientists to make a demonstrable contribution to the ISSI mission by pursuing ambitious independent research, in any of the disciplines that are part of ISSI’s core mission: astronomy & astrophysics, astrobiology, plasma physics, solar physics, solar system science, Earth sciences from space.
The Johannes Geiss Fellow is expected to participate in ISSI activities and to collaborate with ISSI’s scientific staff and visitors, as well as with research institutes in Switzerland and neighboring countries. The Johannes Geiss Fellow is invited to give public lectures in close collaboration with the Pro ISSI Association.
The JGF provides a stipend covering travel costs and living expenses for a stay at ISSI in Bern of up to 6 months. ISSI can host fellows either for a single extended visit (e.g., during a sabbatical) or for several shorter duration stays.
The standard cosmological model states that massive galaxies contain a large fraction of dark matter. Dark matter is a transparent substance that does not interact through regular baryonic matter and is only detected through its gravitational pull over the stars and the gas.
Image of the relic galaxy NGC 1277. The small blue galaxy in the lower half of the image is close to NGC 1277 in projection only. (Credit: NASA, ESA and M. Beasley)
NGC 1277 is known as the prototype of a relic galaxy, that is a galaxy that has not accreted other galaxies since it formed. Relic galaxies are extremely rare and are the untouched remains of the giant galaxies that populated the early Universe. Since relic galaxies are very important to understand the conditions in the early stages of the Universe, we observed NGC 1277 using an integral field spectrograph. The information encoded in the spectra allowed us to build kinematic maps from which the mass distribution in the inner 6 kpc (20000 light years) of the galaxy was inferred. We discovered that the mass distribution of mass in NGC 1277 corresponds to that of stars, and we placed an upper limit of 5% to the fraction of dark matter that could exist within the probed radius. Our result is compatible with no dark matter at all in NGC 1277.
Cosmological simulations based on the standard model predict that for galaxies with the mass of NGC 1277 we should have found a dark matter mass fraction of at least 10% and perhaps of up to 70%. The lack of agreement between the observations and the expectation constitutes a mystery. We proposed two possible explanations for the fact that NGC 1277 lacks dark matter. The first one is that dark matter was stripped by interactions between NGC 1277 and the gravitational field of the cluster of galaxies to which it belongs. The second possibility is that dark matter was expelled from the galaxy when it formed through the merger of small proto-galactic bodies. None of these explanations is fully satisfactory, so the riddle of the formation of the galaxy lacking dark matter remains unsolved.
References (Open Access): Comerón, S., I. Trujillo, M. Cappellari et al, The massive relic galaxy NGC 1277 is dark matter deficient. From dynamical models of integral-field stellar kinematics out to five effective radii, Astron. Astrophys., Volume 675, A 143, July 2023, https://doi.org/10.1051/0004-6361/202346291
ISSI is pleased to announce that Dr. Rumi Nakamura and Prof. Geraint Jones have been appointed as Discipline Scientists as of 1st July 2023. We welcome two outstanding additions to the ISSI Team: Plasma Discipline Scientist Dr. Rumi Nakamura, and Planetary Discipline Scientist Prof. Geraint Jones. Not only Discipline Scientists provide scientific expertise that is complementary to the current ISSI portfolio, but, most important, they are ISSI Ambassadors with their unique communities. As such, they will channel ideas and develop scientific initiatives that will best serve their community, while at the same time explore ways to identify how best ISSI can advance the scientific discourse in their respective fields.
Rumi Nakamura
Rumi Nakamura did her PHD research on “Aurora dynamics and particle injection associated with magnetospheric substorms” at the University Tokyo in Japan. She is currently a group leader at Space Research Institute (IWF), Austrian Academy of Sciences and Lecturer at University of Graz in Austria. Her research interest are space plasma physics; plasma transport and acceleration in the magnetosphere, magnetosphere-ionosphere coupling, solar wind magnetosphere interaction, substorm and storm dynamics. She participated in a number of ESA and NASA space plasma physics missions such as Cluster, DoubleStar, THEMIS as a Co-Investigator and is currently leading the Active Spacecraft Potential Control (ASPOC) instrument for Magnetospheric Multiscale (MMS) mission.
Geraint Jones
Geraint Jones is Professor of Planetary Science at the UCL Department of Space and Climate Physics and is head of MSSL’s Planetary Science Group in the UK. Geraint Jones’ primarily research interests are outer planet systems and cometary science. He has been a member of three different instrument teams on the Cassini-Huygens mission, and is a member of two JUICE teams. His interest in cometary science have concentrated on interactions between comets and the solar wind, as well as modelling the large-scale structure of dust tails. Topics of particular interest include the behaviour of comets near the Sun, and serendipitous comet tail crossings, of which he has found several examples. Geraint led the proposal to ESA for the Comet Interceptor mission to an undiscovered long-period comet. This project adopted by the agency in 2022, and is planned to launch in 2029. He has been appointed as an interdisciplinary scientist on the mission.
Among these was ISSI Team #562 “First Light at Cosmic Dawn: Exploiting the James Webb Space Telescope Revolution”, composed of astrophysicists and computer scientists, who are working on one of the core science goals of JWST: finding the first stars and galaxies in the Universe. Discussions on the insights from the initial months of JWST data during their first meeting led Team #562 and their collaborators to submit three proposals that were awarded 153 hours of observing time with three complementary JWST observing modes.
The first survey (GO-4111; PI Wren Suess) titled “Medium bands, Mega Science: Spatially-resolved R~15 spectrophotometry of 50,000 sources at z=0.3-12” is a NIRCam imaging program that leverages the power of medium-band filters combined with cosmological lensing of the Abell2744 cluster/UNCOVER field to efficiently map both stellar continuum and nebular line emission from ionised gas for large, unbiased galaxy samples. By simultaneously probing multiple emission lines the JWST data will measure star formation and dust obscuration and chart the growth of galaxies across >10 Gyrs of cosmic history.
GOODS-S field (NIRCam image) Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, B. Robertson (UC Santa Cruz), B. Johnson (Center for Astrophysics, Harvard & Smithsonian), S. Tacchella (University of Cambridge, M. Rieke (Univ. of Arizona), D. Eisenstein (Center for Astrophysics, Harvard & Smithsonian), A. Pagan (STScI)
The second program obtains spectroscopy with the NIRSpec instrument (GO-4233; PIs de Graaff & Brammer) over existing, public JWST fields: “A complete census of the rare, extreme and red: A NIRCam-selected extragalactic community survey with JWST/NIRSpec”. The main goal is to obtain detailed, spectroscopic information for newly identified galaxies from JWST images to reveal their nature, and doing this at high completeness.
The final program is a combination of the previous two. GO-3516 (PIs Matthee & Naidu) uses slitless spectroscopy at ~3-4 micron over the same galaxy cluster as the first program in order to search for faint, metal-poor emission line sources. The title of this program summarizes its goals: “All the Little Things: Pop III Signatures & the Ionizing Photon Budget of Dwarf Galaxies in the Epoch of Reionization”.
With more than an 8:1 oversubscription rate for proposals in these categories, the successes of ISSI Team #562 are particularly noteworthy. Speaking on behalf of their team members team leaders Pascal Oesch and Michael Maseda highlighted: “The ISSI team meeting was instrumental in putting these successful proposals together, and we are very thankful to the whole ISSI team for providing us with this opportunity.” ISSI is particularly pleased that the first of these three proposals is led by early-career researcher (ECR) Wren Suess, whose participation to the ISSI Team meeting was enabled by ISSI’s dedicated ECR funding line.
Webb NIRCam composite image of Jupiter from three filters – F360M (red), F212N (yellow-green), and F150W2 (cyan) – and alignment due to the planet’s rotation. Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, Jupiter ERS Team; image processing by Judy Schmidt.
Freshly approved ISSI Team #23-592 “Jupiter’s non-auroral ionosphere” got off to a flying start of its activities with the award of 22 hours with JWST for project GO-3665 (PIs Stallard & Melin). Studying Jupiter’s equatorial ionosphere in more detail with JWST will further the understanding of energy exchange at the top of the atmosphere, by providing improved constraints for ionospheric models. Atmospheric loss occurs only within this upper region, and so characterising the process on Jupiter provides insight into atmospheric erosion and ultimately thresholds the long term evolution of planets both within and outside our own Solar system.
Determining the vertical structure in the ionosphere away from the bright aurora requires a combination of JWST spectral imaging, utilising the NIRSpec instrument’s integral field spectroscopy mode, and spacecraft occultations of the radio signal from Earth. Via JWST project GO-3665, ISSI Team #23-592 plans to measure the ionospheric structure with JWST simultaneously with the first Juno radio occultations of the Jupiter ionosphere on Sep. 7.
In its first year of science operations, JWST has already demonstrated that it is capable of exceeding expectations and making breakthrough observations in many fields of astrophysics.
Looking ahead to the near future, in March 2024 ISSI will organise a workshop on “The chronology of the 1st billion years”. Outlining her expectations for this workshop, ISSI Executive Director and workshop convenor Antonella Nota, says: “JWST was designed to shed (IR) light on what happened in the early stages of the Universe. Now that most observations from the first JWST cycle have been completed, the time is ripe to convene at ISSI all the cosmology experts with early JWST data, to discuss and distill our current understanding of the formation and early evolution of the first stars and galaxies. At ISSI, we felt that this topic was so important that we are dedicating to it our very first Breakthrough Workshop, a workshop that is aimed at addressing one big question in science” Antonella Nota adds: “ISSI is the perfect place to hold such important conversations, by offering a neutral and welcoming environment, and advancing science – one big question at a time.
The ISSI staff look forward to hosting this workshop and to many further exciting JWST results from the ISSI community.
Global sea level and extreme ocean events are rising due to human-caused climate change. The amount of rise in sea level and number of increase in extreme events, however, vary greatly from region to region and they also change over time. To fully understand these changes and thus build the capability of predicting when and where they may occur in the future, we must also consider naturally occurring climate variability. By combining in situ and satellite observations with model simulations, Weiqing Han and collaborators recently investigated the sea level Height EXtreme (HEX) events and co-occurring Marine heatwaves, dubbed Compound Height-Heat EXtreme (CHHEX) events, along Indonesian coasts of the Indian Ocean since the 1960s, particular since 1993 when satellite altimetry data have become available. They found out that most of the HEX and CHHEX events occured during the period from 2010 to 2017. Sea level rise due to the anthropogenic warming and naturally occurring decadal climate variability combined to boost up the HEXs from 2010 to 2017. While the individual HEX-alone events are mainly driven by enhanced northwesterly winds associated with the Indian and/or Australian monsoons from December to March, CHHEXs occur in May-June and November-December mainly in years when negative Indian Ocean Dipole (IOD) and La Niña, the negative phase of the El Niño – Southern Oscillation (ENSO), co-occur. The ENSO and IOD are the dominant natural internal climate variability patterns at interannual time scale. When they co-occur, the intensified equatorial westerly winds and longshore northwesterly winds drive the HEX and CHHEX events. A recent study – published in Nature Communications in October 2022 – suggests the importance of the interplay between interannual-to-decadal climate variability and anthropogenic warming in shaping the extremes, which may help improve decadal predictions and near-term projections of the high impact extreme events. For further details, see the University of Colorado Boulder news release.
Figure: Linear trend maps of satellite observed sea level and surface wind stress from 1993-2018 (left figure). Time series of monthly-mean sea level anomalies from tide gauge observation (black curve) at Java coast (location marked “x2” in the left panel), from satellite observation at the nearest grid point (red), and from the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) Ocean Reanalysis System 4 (ORAS4) ocean reanalysis data at the nearest location (blue)(right figure). (Credit: W. Han)
Weiqing Han
Prof. Weiqing Han (University of Colorado at Boulder, USA) is elected Fellow of American Meteorological Society in 2023 and was selected as the Johannes Geiss Fellow in 2020. Because of the Covid-related travel restrictions, Weiqing Han visited ISSI for the first time in summer 2023. Weiqing has been working on a number of research topics, including understanding the remote versus local forcing in driving year-to-year variations of the U.S. east coasts sea level, exploring the roles of atmospheric intraseasonal oscillations – particularly the Madden-Julian Oscillation – in causing sea level extremes along the Indonesian coasts, finding new climate patterns in the tropical Atlantic and Indian Oceans, and investigating the Indian-Pacific-monsoon interactions as well as the global linkage of decadal sea level patterns.
Happy summer! Hope you are all surviving the sweltering heat and taking some well deserved rest from the hectic winter activities. At ISSI, we are still working at full capacity, catching up from the pandemic hiatus: teams are visiting, workshops are being held, working groups are coming back, totally immersed in discussing, debating, moving science forward. It is a pleasure to see, finally, the teams meeting in person, but with the added bonus that remote access has become a welcome reality to allow fully inclusive participation, and the technology upgrades have made that addition possible and smooth.
As we are starting to prepare ISSI scientific program for 2024, I solicit your ideas for compelling science topics to be discussed. While the International Teams for 2023 have already been selected, on a variety of exciting scientific topics in the four disciplines that ISSI covers, we have other interesting scientific initiatives that could benefit from your input: Workshops, Forums and Working Groups. See https://www.issibern.ch/program/tools/ to learn more about what each initiative offers.
Now, we want to hear from you.
If you have a compelling science question that you feel would be perfect for a discussion in a neutral, collegial and welcoming atmosphere, such as is offered by ISSI, please do get in touch with me and/or the ISSI Directors and we will work together to identify the tools that would best fit the purpose. ISSI is here to partner with you, the scientific community we serve, and we look forward to hearing from you.
Now a couple of important announcements.
On behalf of the entire ISSI staff, we say farewell to Prof. Georges Meylan, who has left his post as Chair of the ISSI Board of Trustees at the end of June, after seven years of dedication and commitment. Prof. Meylan greatly contributed to make ISSI the strong and stable organization it is today, and for that, ISSI is very grateful.
We also offer a warm welcome to the new Chair of the ISSI Board of Trustees, Prof. Willy Benz, who has started in this new role on July 1st. Prof. Benz, Professor Emeritus of Astrophysics at the University of Bern, is a world expert in exoplanet science. He is the Principal Investigator of the very successful ESA Mission CHEOPS, and is President Elect of the International Astronomical Union. This is the message that Prof. Benz offers to the ISSI scientific community, as he starts his new job at the helm of the ISSI Board of Trustees.
Welcome to ISSI, the International Space Science Institute
Willy Benz, Chair of the Board of Trustees (Image: KEYSTONE/A. della Valle)
ISSI is an Institute of Advanced Studies with a mission to contribute to a deeper understanding of the workings of Planet Earth, the Solar System and its components, and the Universe near and far. Scientists with a wide range of expertise come to ISSI from all over the world to discuss data collected by space missions, ground-based observatories or laboratory experiments, and to exchange and discuss ideas in a multidisciplinary environment. They address compelling and relevant questions, and their conclusions are published in peer-reviewed literature and shared with their communities. ISSI provides the infrastructure and atmosphere, away from the stress of everyday life, in which these discussions can unfold in a unique way, making it a truly special place. On the practical side, ISSI’s friendly staff will help you prepare for your visit and ensure that you can concentrate fully on science during your stay.
On this website you will find all the information you need about ISSI, its activities and the tools it provides. If you are new and interested, we look forward to welcoming you to Bern, and for those who have experienced ISSI, we look forward to seeing you again!
