An international team led by ASTRON and the Observatoire de Paris-PSL has observed the first definitive radio signal of a coronal mass ejection (CME) from a star beyond our Solar System. The eruption was detected from a nearby red dwarf star just 130 light-years away using the LOFAR radio telescope. Such stellar storms, similar to [...]
Germany has awarded a €10.7 million contract to OHB Digital Connect to supply 86 high-frequency receivers for the SKA-Mid radio telescope in South Africa. Signed on 29 October 2025 in Berlin during the launch of Germany’s High-tech Agenda, the contract marks Germany’s first SKAO project since joining the Observatory last year. Contributions from the MPIfR [...]
An international team led by Peking University and ASTRON has discovered a new type of radio emission from the red dwarf AD Leo, the most common type of star in our Galaxy (Jiale Zhang et al., Science Advances 2025). Using China’s FAST telescope, they observed millisecond-long bursts whose frequencies sweep at an astonishing 8 GHz per [...]
An international team of astronomers has, for the first time, used the NOEMA interferometer to detect the thermal Sunyaev–Zel’dovich (tSZ) effect in the distant galaxy cluster CL J1226.9+3332, nearly 7 billion light-years away (read Muñoz-Echeverría M. et al., 2025). By mapping the tSZ signal at unprecedented resolution, NOEMA revealed that the cluster’s hot gas has a surprisingly [...]
An international team has used the European VLBI Network (EVN) together with e-MERLIN, the Green Bank Telescope, (GBT) and the Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA), to detect a mysterious dark object in a distant galaxy. The discovery, made through the object’s gravitational lensing effect rather than direct light, reveals the lowest-mass object ever identified using [...]
The Committee on Radio Astronomy Frequencies (CRAF) has been admitted as an I-member of the International Special Committee on Radio Interference (CISPR) - a major step toward addressing unintended electromagnetic radiation (UEMR) from satellites. This development marks growing recognition that satellite-generated radio noise poses a serious threat to radio astronomy, which depends on detecting extremely [...]
A new study led by MPIfR (Guang-Yao Zhao) demonstrates a major advance in millimeter VLBI: the first single-optical-path frequency-phase-transfer (FPT) observations between 86 GHz and 258 GHz on an 8600 km baseline. Using APEX’s newly commissioned N3AR receiver in dual-band mode and simultaneous observations with the IRAM 30 m telescope — both supported by RadioNet — [...]
During the week of 22–26 September 2025, the SKA Observatory (SKAO) showcased its scientific and societal impact at G20-related events under South Africa’s presidency. For the first time, SKAO addressed the G20 Research and Innovation Ministerial Meeting, highlighting how its global collaboration is driving discovery, innovation, and socio-economic benefits. The week also saw the first [...]
Astronomers have observed the earliest stages of planet formation around the baby star HOPS-315, 1,300 light-years away. The international team, including scientists from Chalmers University of Technology and Onsala Space Observatory, analyzed chemical signals that reveal the first building blocks of rocky planets. Using data from the James Webb Space Telescope and the ALMA observatory, [...]
Astronomers have observed a rare Einstein Cross with a bright central fifth image, produced by gravitational lensing of the distant galaxy HerS-3 (11.6 billion light-years away). Observations with NOEMA (IRAM, France), ALMA, VLA, and Hubble show that the five-image configuration can only be explained by a massive dark matter halo in the foreground galaxy group. [...]