The first prototype dish of the SKA-Mid telescope constructed on site in South Africa has achieved first light. The prototype, known as SKAMPI, is a fully functioning single-dish radio telescope in its own right and was funded by Germany’s Max Planck Society for technical commissioning and scientific use. It was designed by the SKAO’s international [...]
There are still challenges to broader and effective access to Research Infrastructures (RIs). The objectives of the ESFRI (European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures) are to identify these challenges, propose ways to address them and propose orientations for the revision of the European Charter of Access to Research Infrastructures. To this end, the ESFRI Drafting [...]
The EVN announced the relaunch of its virtual seminars. This EVN series of talks focus on the capabilities of Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI) and its significant contributions to different astronomical fields. The first talk is scheduled for 14 February 2024, at 14:00 CET and will be presented by Jack Radcliffe from the University of [...]
The call for proposals of the 100-m radio telescope (Effelsberg/DE) of the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy is open. Access/funding is offered through the ORP project. Submission deadline: Deadline 5 February 2024 (15:00 UT) Image: © N. Tacken (MPIfR)
The Max Planck Society call for APEX Proposals is open. See the call here. Deadline: 23 February 2024 (18:00 CET). Image: © ESO, B. Tafreshi
An international team of astronomers, led by researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy, have used the MeerKAT radio telescope to discover an intriguing object of an unknown nature in the globular cluster NGC 1851. The massive object is heavier than the heaviest neutron stars known and yet simultaneously lighter than the lightest [...]
The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) Collaboration has released new images of M87*, the supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy Messier 87, using data from observations taken in April 2018. The paper “The persistent shadow of the supermassive black hole of M87” (Astronomy & Astrophysics, https://doi.org/10.1051/0004-6361/202347932) presents new images from the 2018 data that reveal [...]
Observations presented in a detailed study using the ALMA radio observatory found four binary proto-stars, one triple, one quadruple and one quintuple system in one massive star cluster. This results, which have been published in Nature Astronomy (Li, S., Sanhueza, P., Beuther, H. et al. Observations of high-order multiplicity in a high-mass stellar protocluster. Nat [...]
An international team of astronomers has revealed mysterious star formation at the far edge of the galaxy M83. The research used several instruments, including the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) and the Green Bank Telescope (GBT) from NRAO, along with the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan's (NAOJ) [...]
China sent a new astronomical satellite named Einstein Probe (EP) into space to observe mysterious transient phenomena in the universe which flicker like fireworks, trying to reveal more about this violent and little-known side of the cosmos. The satellite is shaped like a lotus in full bloom and features 12 petals and two stamens. The [...]