News

The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) collaboration is excited for having been granted by the Royal Astronomical Society (RAS) with the 2021 Group Achievement Award (A). The EHT is a global network of synchronised radio observatories that work in unison to observe radio sources associated with black holes. In April 2019, the EHT team showed the world the first image of the shadow cast by the black hole in M87, made possible by the enormous baselines which give the EHT its exquisite angular resolution.

The January 2021 issue of the EVN/JIVE Newsletter is available!

The European astronomy community has been granted 15 M€ to improve how radio and optical telescopes across the continent work together. The OPTICON-RadioNet PILOT (ORP) brings experts from the ground-based astronomy community to support improved access to a wider range of facilities, enabling the fastest-growing type of astronomy – including as many wavelengths as possible in a single study – and in doing so hopefully yield more discoveries. Astronomers from 15 European countries, Australia and South Africa and 37 institutions have joined the ORP consortium, funded by the EU H2020 programme.

October 6th celebrates National Diversity Day (NDD) in the Netherlands (https://www.diversityday.nl/), a day to work on improving diversity in all its aspects, including sexual preferences, gender identity, origin, religion, physical disabilities, a distance to the labor market, and more.

In 2019, the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) Collaboration delivered the first image of a black hole, revealing M87*-the supermassive object in the center of the M87 galaxy. The EHT team, including researchers from JIVE, has now used the lessons learned last year to analyze the archival data sets from 2009-2013, some of them not published before. The analysis reveals the behavior of the black hole image across multiple years, indicating persistence of the crescent-like shadow feature, but also variation of its orientation-the crescent appears to be wobbling. The full results appeared today in The Astrophysical Journal.

Huib van Langevelde (Chief Scientist in JIVE, Dwingeloo, also Professor of Galactic Radio Astronomy at Leiden) has been selected as the new director of the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT). The EHT is a collaboration involving about 350 scientists from 18 countries. The EHT combines sub-millimeter telescopes around the world, including the ALMA array in Chile, and published the first image of a Black Hole in 2019.

The European VLBI Network (EVN) is pleased to announce a series of online seminars “The sharpest view of the radio Universe: VLBI – Connecting Astronomers Worldwide”. Seven speakers will cover 7 different science topics, and the talks will occur roughly every 7 weeks between early July 2020 and the EVN Symposium, which has been rescheduled to July 12-16, 2021. These talks will illustrate how Very Long Baseline Interferometry can improve our understanding of many astronomical phenomena, from stars to galaxies, and the talks are aimed at a broad astronomical audience.

An international group of researchers observed a source of variable gamma rays identified in 2010 by the NASA satellite Fermi. They used a technique called VLBI, that combines data from several radio telescopes on Earth, to produce the sharpest images. Surprisingly, the source of gamma rays was a symbiotic nova, a peculiar stellar system known to astronomers as V407 Cyg.

A Canadian-led team of astronomers, including researchers from JIVE, has discovered that a repeating fast radio burst (FRB) originating from a nearby galaxy pulses at regular intervals. Researchers within the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME) Fast Radio Burst Collaboration used the CHIME telescope in British Columbia to show that the repeating radio source known as FRB 180916.J0158+65 - first discovered in 2018 by the same group - pulsates apparently every 16.35 days.

JIVE is an international research infrastructure committed to recognise and protect diversity as the key against discrimination.