Sweden and the United Kingdom have officially joined LOFAR ERIC (European Research Infrastructure Consortium) as full members, following a Council decision on 26 March 2025. This brings the consortium’s total membership to eight countries, marking a major milestone in the growth of Europe’s premier low-frequency radio astronomy network. Both countries have been long-standing collaborators, hosting [...]
IVTW2025 will take place October 21-25, 2025. The meeting will be hosted by Chalmers University of Technology, Onsala Space Observatory, in Gothenburg, Sweden. The scope of the workshop is to encompass all areas of VLBI hardware and software development and techniques on station updates, frontends, backends, recorders, correlation, image processing, potential space VLBI missions and [...]
The SFXC workshop is aimed at individuals interested in using the Super FX Correlator ("SFXC") for software correlation of data from their own VLBI instruments (or other long-ish baseline radio interferometers), as well as scientists who want to exploit SFXC's advanced features by doing their own correlation. The workshop will take place over of two [...]
Astronomers have found a planet that orbits at an angle of 90 degrees around a rare pair of peculiar stars. This is the first time we have strong evidence for one of these ‘polar planets’ orbiting a stellar pair. The surprise discovery was made using the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (VLT). Read more. [...]
Most stars form in molecular clusters, with specific environmental conditions dictating how planetary systems develop. Nearby massive stars can also influence by intense ionizing radiation, which can create a shell of ionized gas around a protoplanetary disk and emit unique hydrogen recombination spectral lines. Recently a scientific team led by Ryan Boyden/University of Virginia has [...]
The European Commission has launched two consultations on the future European Strategy for Artificial Intelligence in Science: a Call for Evidence, and a targeted questionnaire for researchers and the broader research and innovation community. The strategy will aim at accelerating the responsible use of Artificial Intelligence. Everyone interested can contribute to the Call for Evidence. Researchers and [...]
The first image from the international SKA Observatory’s telescope in Australia, SKA-Low, has been released on 17 March 2025 – a significant milestone in its quest to reveal an unparalleled view of our Universe. The image shows an area of sky of about 25 square degrees – equivalent to approximately 100 full Moons. In it [...]
Swirling through the Milky Way’s central zone, surrounding the supermassive black hole Sgr A*, dust and gases constantly churn as energetic shock waves ripple. An international scientific team using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) has sharpened our view of this action by a factor of 100, discovering a surprising new filamentary structure in this [...]
An international team of researchers used multi-wavelength observations of active galactic nuclei to study how black holes launch relativistic jets. The sixteen sources were observed with the Event Horizon Telescope during its first campaign in 2017. The extreme resolution achieved by the Event Horizon Telescope enabled studies of jets closer than ever to the central [...]
Two different teams of astronomers have detected oxygen in the most distant known galaxy, JADES-GS-z14-0. The discovery, reported in two separate studies, was made possible thanks to the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), in which the European Southern Observatory (ESO) is a partner. This record-breaking detection is making astronomers rethink how quickly galaxies formed in [...]