News from the CRAQ Latest news

Eta Carinae: Violent stellar wind collision in the binary star monster

Eta Carinae is a massive, bright stellar binary system. The more massive component is one of the largest and most luminous stars known. In the central region of the binary, the powerful stellar winds from both stars collide at speeds up to 10 million km per hour. An international research team led by Gerd Weigelt from the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy (MPIfR) in Bonn, and Professor Anthony Moffat from Université de Montréal and the Centre de recherche en astrophysique du Québec (CRAQ), has for the first time studied Eta Carinae using near-infrared interferometric imaging techniques. The team obtained unique images of the wind collision regions between the two stars. These discoveries improve our understanding of this enigmatic stellar monster. The observations were carried out with the Very Large Telescope Interferometer (VLTI) of the European Southern Observatory (ESO).  Click here for more info

Awards Latest news

Le professeur Gilles Fontaine reçoit la Médaille de l’ACP

L’Association canadienne des physiciens et physiciennes (ACP) décerne la Médaille de l’ACP pour contributions exceptionnelles à la physique 2016 à Gilles Fontaine, Université de Montréal, pour son apport à la compréhension des étoiles de type naines blanches et son rôle de leadership au sein de la collectivité internationale de la physique.  Click here for more info

The Centre for Research in Astrophysics of Québec (CRAQ) is a partnership between the Université de Montréal, McGill University, and the Université Laval. The CRAQ brings together all researchers working in the field of astronomy and astrophysics of these three institutions, as well as other collaborators from Bishop's University, the Canadian Space Agency, the Cégep de Sherbrooke, and the private sector (Photon etc., ABB Bomem Inc., Nüvü Caméras). The CRAQ is funded through the program Regroupements stratégiques of the Fonds de recherche du Québec – Nature et technologies (FRQ-NT).

The CRAQ constitutes a unique grouping of researchers in astrophysics in Québec bent on excellence and whose varying and complementary fields of expertise allows them to be innovative, creative and competitive in several scientific fields, thus offering graduate students a wide variety of subjects in both fundamental and applied fields of research.

The activities of the CRAQ follow four main thrusts :

• Fundamental and applied research in astrophysics,
• Development of instrumentation for national, international and space based observatories through the Laboratoire d'astrophysique expériementale (LAE),
• the Observatoire du Mont-Mégantic (OMM),
• and, finally, the spreading of our astrophysics knowledge to the public at large.

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