Furthest ever detection of a galaxy’s magnetic field

Using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), astronomers have detected the magnetic field of a galaxy so far away that its light has taken more than 11 billion years to reach us. The result provides astronomers with vital clues about how the magnetic fields of galaxies like our own Milky Way came to be. Read  ALMA´s press release here.

Image: © ESO/J. Geach et al.; This infrared image shows the distant galaxy 9io9, seen here as a reddish arc curved around a bright nearby galaxy. This nearby galaxy acts as a gravitational lens: its mass curves spacetime around it, bending lightrays coming from 9io9 in the background, hence its distorted shape. This colour view results from combining infrared images taken with ESO’s Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy (VISTA) in Chile and the Canada France Hawaii Telescope (CFHT) in the US.

Poland and the SKAO

JIVE Director Agnieszka Słowikowska at the XLI Meeting of the Polish Astronomical Society in Toruń organised and moderated a session over the prospect of Poland developing closer links with the SKA Observatory. The SKAO sees in Poland a potential partner in Central Europe, building on the Observatory's existing European membership. With VLBI one of the planned observing modes of the SKA telescopes, this partnership could also mark the beginning of a closer collaboration between SKAO and EVN - but also with JIVE, as an appropriate place to correlate the data.

Image: © Patryk Zgubiński; Agnieszka Słowikowska/JIVE Director giving a talk on the links between Poland and the SKAO.

Transnational Access CALLS:

European VLBI Network: Call for Proposals open

The call for proposals for the European VLBI Network (EVN) is open. EVN access and travel support is possible through the OPTICON RadioNet Pilot project (ORP). All regular proposals should be submitted through the Northstar submission tool.

Submission deadline:  1 October 2023 at 16:00 UTC.

Open e-Merlin Call - Cycle 17

The e-Merlin call for proposals for Cycle 17 is now open. Read the call here. Please use the e-MERLIN proposal tool to submit your proposal. Access/funding is offered through the ORP (Opticon RadioNet Pilot) project. Deadline for proposal submission: 2 November 2023, 13:59:59 UT. 

European ALMA Regional Centre

The European ALMA Regional Centre (ARC) provides the interface between the ALMA project and the European science community. The ARC is staffed by scientists with expertise in radio astronomy and interferometry and it supports its users throughout the lifetime of a project, from proposal preparation to data analysis. Users that want to visit an ARC node for a face-to-face visit can apply for funding through the ORP project. 

Westerbork Apertif Long Term Archive

ALTA offers to the world-wide astronomical community free virtual access to data and scientific products produced from all sky surveys of the Northern sky that will be conducted with the new Apertif frontend of the Westerbork Synthesis Radio Telescope (WSRT), as well as tools to query, further exploit and perform data mining of these products adaptable to diverse research goals. The access/funding offered through the ORP project.

LOFAR Long Term Archive

LTA is a long-established archive and access facility supporting the international LOFAR telescope. It is currently the largest radio astronomical archive in the world already exceeding 45 PB from LOFAR’s past 10 years of operations. The LTA provides a central and key resource for all observed LOFAR astronomical science programs where the data become public within 12 months of first creation. The access/funding is offered through the ORP project.