September 16, 2025 — The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) collaboration, with major contributions from the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy (MPIfR), has unveiled new images of the supermassive black hole at the center of galaxy M87. For the first time, the EHT detects faint emission from the base of M87’s relativistic jet, while multi-year [...]
An international team of astronomers has traced one of the brightest one-off fast radio bursts (FRBs) ever observed - FRB 20250316A - to a galaxy 130 million light-years away. Using the Canadian CHIME radio telescope and its newly completed outrigger stations, the team localized the burst to a region just 45 light-years wide, the most [...]
For the first time, astronomers have directly tracked the transformation of a dying star over more than a century - revealing that it is heating up faster than any other typical star ever observed. The study, led by Professor Albert Zijlstra (The University of Manchester) and published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, examines 130 years [...]
Astronomers using ALMA have discovered a vast bubble of gas and dust surrounding the red supergiant star DFK 52 — the largest structure of its kind ever seen in the Milky Way. Containing as much mass as the Sun and stretching 1.4 light years across, the bubble was created by a dramatic stellar eruption about [...]
An international team of astronomers has unveiled a stunning image of a cosmic jet aimed directly at Earth, revealing the long-sought explanation for the extraordinary brightness of the blazar PKS 1424+240. The discovery, published today in Astronomy & Astrophysics Letters, shows the blazar’s jet as a glowing “Eye of Sauron” in deep space - its [...]
An international team of astronomers, led by Dr Efthalia Traianou of Heidelberg University, has captured the most detailed image yet of the galaxy OJ 287, located five billion light years away. The groundbreaking observation reveals a sharply curved, ribbon-like plasma jet emerging from the galaxy’s core - a phenomenon never before seen in OJ 287. [...]
Astronomers have identified a baffling new cosmic radio source - ILT J163430+445010 - emitting bright radio pulses every 14 minutes with unexpected shifts between circular and linear polarization. The source is linked to a white dwarf binary exhibiting a unique companion-triggered radio burst mechanism. This discovery challenges existing models of stellar radio emissions and may open a new window [...]
Astronomers using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) have unveiled intricate internal structures within early galaxies—just 1 billion years after the Big Bang—as part of the CRISTAL survey. By tracing ionised carbon ([C II]) emission in 39 typical star-forming galaxies and combining it with Hubble and JWST imagery, the team has revealed: Clumps of star formation [...]
The international research team led by Prof. Michael Kramer of the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy (MPIfR) has been awarded the prestigious Frontiers of Science Award 2025 in the category Astrophysics and Cosmology – Theory. Their groundbreaking study, “Strong-Field Gravity Tests with the Double Pulsar”, published in Physical Review X in 2021, presents the [...]
The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) collaboration has uncovered the reason why the stunning image of the M87* black hole features a ring that appears slightly elliptical rather than a perfect circle. The distortion - ranging from 2% to 20% - is attributed to turbulent plasma swirling near the black hole’s event horizon. This insight is [...]