News

This year the astronomy community is commemorating the 50^th anniversary of the first successful VLBI (Very Long Baseline Interferometry) experiments. 

Twelve institutes from 8 different countries have teamed up in the JUMPING JIVE project, which was awarded nearly 3 million euro by the Horizon 2020 Framework Programme of the EU for the next 4 years.

RadioNet, a consortium of 28 leading institutions for radio astronomical research from 13 countries, has been awarded 10 million Euro by the European Commission, to be used over the next four years. The speaker of the RadioNet consortium is Prof. J. Anton Zensus from the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Bonn (Germany).

Astronomers - among them scientists from ASTRON, University of Amsterdam, Leiden University and JIVE in the Netherlands - have for the first time pinpointed the location of a so-called ‘fast radio burst' - a type of short-duration radio flash of enigmatic origin - and have used this to identify its host galaxy. The team presented their findings at the American Astronomical Society's winter meeting in Grapevine, Texas. The results appear today in Nature and the Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Astronomers from China and Europe have identified a pair of active supermassive black holes in the nearby giant spiral galaxy NGC 5252.

Radio astronomers have used a radio telescope network the size of the Earth to zoom in on a unique phenomenon in a distant galaxy: a jet activated by a star being consumed by a supermassive black hole. The record-sharp observations reveal a compact and surprisingly slowly-moving source of radio waves.

An international team of radio astronomers led by Jun Yang (Onsala Space Observatory, Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden) studied the new-born jet in a source known as Swift J1644+57 with the European VLBI Network (EVN), an Earth-size radio telescope array.

NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, the Hubble Space Telescope and the NSF's Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) provided new insights into a faint radio source in the direction of the globular cluster M15.

DWINGELOO, The Netherlands (14 January 2016) - Director Huib van Langevelde delivered the traditional New Year's speech to JIVE and ASTRON staff today.

Click here for a full text PDF of the 2016 New Year's speech.

42 million light years away, 20 million times the mass of the Sun, and coming back to life. A team of radio astronomers, led by Dr Megan Argo of the Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics, and JIVE astronomer Dr Ilse van Bemmel, are watching a previously dormant black hole wake up in a dramatic display as material falls on to it for the first time for perhaps millions of years.