Using the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (ESO’s VLT), astronomers have discovered an exoplanet orbiting Barnard’s star, the closest single star to our Sun. On this newly discovered exoplanet, which has at least half the mass of Venus, a year lasts just over three Earth days. The team’s observations also hint at the existence [...]
For the first time, astronomers have captured images of a star other than the Sun in enough detail to track the motion of bubbling gas on its surface. The images of the star, R Doradus, were obtained with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), in July and August 2023. They show giant, hot bubbles of [...]
First fringes refers to the successful correlation of data from separate antennas stations – in this case two stations – signifying that SKA-Low has begun to work as an interferometer. Both of the SKA Observatory’s telescopes – SKA-Low in Western Australia and its counterpart SKA-Mid in South Africa’s Northern Cape – are radio interferometers. They [...]
In a new paper led by Daizhong Liu (Max-Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics), observations from ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) and the Atacama Large Millimetre/submillimetre Array (ALMA) were combined to study the motion of gas within PJ0116-24. ALMA traces cold gas, seen here in blue, whereas the VLT, with its new Enhanced Resolution Imager and [...]
Astronomers find and study multiple rare and unusual pulsars in dense stellar cluster using MeerKAT in South Africa and the U.S. Green Bank Telescope. An international team led by researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics, the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy, and the National Radio Astronomy Observatory has discovered ten rapidly [...]
Astronomers recently used two very different and powerful telescopes, the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) and NASA's James Webb Space Telescope's (JWST) Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI), to discover twin disks and twin parallel jets erupting from young stars in a multiple-star system. This discovery was unexpected and unprecedented, given the stars, disks, and jets' age, size, [...]
An international team of astronomers suspects based on their findings that non-repeating fast radio bursts (FRBs) probably originate from galaxies similar to our Milky Way. The team compared the polarised light from 128 of these non-repeating FRBs with repeating ones. The researchers published their results in The Astrophysical Journal with the title Polarization Properties of [...]
On 3 April 2024, ORP launched the first episode of the online series "ORP science talk". This series allows scientists from the optical and radio spectrum, from ORP beyond, to present their work and scientific results. In the first episode Zsofia Nagy talked about young stellar objects and Cosimo Inserra about supernovas. Rob Beswick from the [...]
An international research team led by Gregory Desvignes from the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Bonn/DE has used the Effelsberg and Jodrell Bank radio telescopes to observe the precessing magnetar XTE J1810-197 — a highly magnetised and ultra-dense neutron star — shortly after its X-ray enhanced activity and radio reactivation. This precession damped [...]
A new image from the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) collaboration has uncovered strong and organized magnetic fields spiraling from the edge of the supermassive black hole Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*). Seen in polarized light for the first time, this new view of the monster lurking at the heart of the Milky Way Galaxy has revealed [...]