Highlights
The universe blazes with energy, not just among stars, nebulae, and teeming galactic nurseries, but also erupting as high-speed jets of ionized matter from some of the most powerful destructive sources ever known –…
Magnetic fields are difficult to detect. For decades, astronomers have studied the factors that shape the interiors of galaxies—gravity, kinetic energy, stellar radiation, gas pressure—but magnetic fields remain largely…
The Universe is a violent place, where even a star’s life can be cut short. That happens when it finds itself in a “bad” neighborhood, and specifically the neighborhood of a…
An international team of scientists have observed both the shadow of a black hole at the center of the Messier 87 (M87) galaxy and…
2022 Highlights
The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is the largest infrared telescope facility ever sent to space, and is poised to provide a tremendous…
Blazars are some of the brightest objects in the sky. They consist of a…
We think of stars as stable systems and indeed they take millions of years to evolve significantly. However, stable does not mean static. Many stars, from all masses and sizes display pulsations on timescales between…
It is known that low-mass stars end their lives as white dwarfs, while high-mass stars become…
Supernova remnants are the final act in the life of a massive star which ends with a violent explosion. They consist of the material released during the stellar explosion, which is traveling with supersonic speeds in…
Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN) are the most powerful, persistent objects in the Universe. They emit enormous amount of…
The X-ray emission of galaxies is a powerful tool for studying the populations of stellar remnants such as neutron stars and black holes. This is because many of these remnants are members of binary stellar systems in…
2021 Highlights
The European Pulsar Timing Array (EPTA) is a scientific collaboration bringing together teams of astronomers around the largest European radio…
Super-massive black holes (SMBHs), that is black holes with at least one million times the mass of the Sun, are…
A group of astronomers, including Prof. Iossif Papadakis of the Institute of Astrophysics and the Department of Physics of the University of Crete have recently…
Polarized light emitted by Galactic interstellar dust acts as a veil obscuring our view of microwave emission from the early Universe - the cosmic microwave background (CMB), often called the Big Bang "ashes". An…
A large-scale magnetic field (ranging from a fraction of a μG to hundreds of mG) permeates the…
The models that seek to explain the reflection spectrum in black hole binaries usually invoke a point-like primary source of hard…
2020 Highlights
Large scale structures, such as groups of galaxies, galaxy clusters, and superclusters, have long been the workhorses of observational cosmology. Now a new way to observe them promises to provide new insights to one of…
Luminous and ultraluminous infrared galaxies (LIRGs/ULIRGs) have been an active area of galaxy research since their discovery more than three decades ago. With its vast increase in sensitivity in the infrared, Spitzer…
Strong indications for the existence of a second planet in orbit around Proxima Centauri, the nearest star to the Sun, have been recently unveiled by an international team of scientists.
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2019 Highlights
Research conducted by an international team of astronomers, published in the scientific journal Nature, revealed an enormous nebula around an extreme form of a merging galaxy.
The galaxy named Makani (Hawaiian for 'wind') is pushing a…
As a star evolves, depleting the hydrogen in its nucleus and becoming a supergiant, its size may increase by more than 500 times. If the star is in a binary system it enters the so-called common envelope phase, in which the evolved star engulfs…
Galactic black-hole X-ray binaries (BHBs) emit a compact, optically thick, mildly relativistic radio jet when they are in hard and hard-intermediate states. In these states, BHBs exhibit a correlation between the time…
2018 Highlights
Drs Pablo Reig and Dmitry Blinov of the Institute of Astrophysics have found the first evidence of precessing warped…
Dr. Aris Tritsis and Prof. Konstantinos Tassis of the Department of Physics of the University of Crete have reported the first-ever discovery of normal modes in a molecular cloud, called Musca. This discovery has allowed the two researchers to…
2017 Highlights
An international team of astronomers, including Prof. Vasiliki Pavlidou of the Institute of Astrophysics and the Department of Physics of the University of Crete…