Astronomers take the first close-up picture of a star outside our galaxy

“For the first time, we have succeeded in taking a zoomed-in image of a dying star in a galaxy outside our own Milky Way,” says Keiichi Ohnaka, an astrophysicist from Universidad Andrés Bello in Chile. Located a staggering 160 000 light-years from us, the star WOH G64 was imaged thanks to the impressive sharpness offered by the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope Interferometer (ESO’s VLTI). The new observations reveal a star puffing out gas and dust, in the last stages before it becomes a supernova.

Read the full ESO article here.

Image: © ESO/K. Ohnaka et al.; This is an image of the star WOH G64, taken by the GRAVITY instrument on the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope Interferometer (ESO’s VLTI). This is the first close-up picture of a star outside our own galaxy, the Milky Way. The star is located in the Large Magellanic Cloud, over 160 000 light-years away. The bright oval at the centre of this image is a dusty cocoon that enshrouds the star. A fainter elliptical ring around it could be the inner rim of a dusty torus, but more observations are needed to confirm this feature.

Filippo Zerbi elected as chairperson of the SKAO Council from 2025

Italian astrophysicist Dr Filippo Zerbi has been elected as the next chairperson of the SKA Observatory Council, the intergovernmental organisation’s governing body. Read more here.

Germany has become an official member of the SKAO

Germany has been admitted as the twelfth member of the international astronomy organisation the SKA Observatory. As the first official act of its SKAO membership, Germany will host the next SKAO Science Conference, which will take place at the DZA site in Görlitz from 16-20 June 2025. Read more here.

India celebrates SKAO membership

India’s membership of the SKA Observatory has been marked at an event in Pune attended by senior government officials, including the secretary of the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) and the secretary of the Department of Science and Technology (DST). Read more here.

Open call: MAGIC observation proposals

The MAGIC collaboration encourages external scientists to propose observations using the MAGIC telescopes, with observation time granted by the Time Allocation Committee (TAC) based on scientific merit. There is no predefined allocation of time between internal or external collaborators.

The ACME project enables transnational access (TA) on the basis of scientific merit to a wide range of complementary astroparticle, high energy and astronomical Research Infrastructures to perform new science of multi-messenger astrophysics. ACME project has received funding from the European Union's Horizon Europe Research and innovation programme under Grant Agreement No 101131928

Read more here.

Submission deadline: 31 January 2025 at 23:59 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.