Sweden signs SKAO Convention to join Observatory
Sweden will soon join the SKA Observatory as a member following the signing of the SKA Observatory Convention at an event at the Swedish Embassy in London on 21 January 2025. Read more.
100-m Effelsberg radio telescope: Open call for proposals
The call for proposals of the 100-m radio telescope (Effelsberg/DE) of the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy is open. Submission deadline: 04 February 2025 (15:00 UT) Image: © N. Tacken (MPIfR)
New book: Discover the story behind the SKA
See here the book The Square Kilometre Array: A Science Mega-Project in the Making, 1990-2012 - by Richard Schilizzi & colleagues. The book chronicles the early days of this global collaboration.
WSRT: Enigmatic Distant Radio Bursts Appear to be Neutron Stars
Using the radio telescope at Westerbork astronomers have discovered two dozen of the unexplained Fast Radio Bursts. After zooming in on the signal of the distant bursts, the astronomers found a striking similarity to the radio flashes emitted by nearby, known neutron stars. The discovery is remarkable because these nearby neutron stars already produce more [...]
A&A: new policy on paper length
Astronomy & Astrophysics (A&A) has decided to implement publication costs for papers exceeding a size limit, effective for papers submitted to A&A from 2 April 2025. Any authors wishing to exceed the page cap for their regular paper or Letter will need to pay a page charge that supports the additional costs associated with the [...]
ALMA Uncover Surprising New Methods Planets May Form
A new study led by researchers at Lowell Observatory, combining data from the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) and Keck Observatory, has unveiled intriguing findings about planet formation in this binary star system, known as DF Tau, along with other systems in this region. See the results in the scientific paper Sites of Planet Formation [...]
Young Stars in the Milky Way’s Backyard Challenge Our Understanding of How They Form
Astronomers have made groundbreaking discoveries about young star formation in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), along with observations from the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA). The study with the title JWST Mid-infrared Spectroscopy Resolves Gas, Dust, and Ice in Young Stellar Objects in the Large Magellanic Cloud is [...]
First-Ever Detection of a Mid-Infrared Flare in Sagittarius A*, the central source of the Milky Way
Using the MIRI instrument onboard of the James Webb Space Telescope, an international team of scientists made the first-ever detection of a mid-IR flare from Sagittarius A*, the supermassive massive black hole at the heart of the Milky Way. In simultaneous radio observations, the team found a radio counterpart of the flare lagging behind in [...]
World’s darkest and clearest skies at risk from industrial megaproject
On December 24th, AES Andes, a subsidiary of the US power company AES Corporation, submitted a project for a massive industrial complex for environmental impact assessment. This complex threatens the pristine skies above ESO’s Paranal Observatory in Chile’s Atacama Desert, the darkest and clearest of any astronomical observatory in the world. Read more. Image: © [...]
Open GMVA Call for Proposals 29 January 2025
The Global mm-VLBI Array (GMVA) Call for Proposals for observations in Autumn 2025 and later is open. Submission deadline: 29 January 2025