Past Highlights

2023 Highlights

The Radio – X-ray correlation in black-hole binaries

From their birth, the stars in our Galaxy are mostly in binaries. Our Sun is an exception. The more massive of the two stars in a binary evolves faster than the less massive one and ends its luminous life as a compact…

RoboPol’s predictions on black hole jets verified by NASA’s IXPE

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 –…

Understanding Galactic Dynamos

Spiral galaxies, including ours, have significant large-scale magnetic fields with energy densities comparable to those of turbulent and thermal motions. Therefore, these magnetic fields can play a crucial role in a…

Low frequency gravitational waves detected

A collaboration of European astronomers, including Dr. John Antoniadis from IA-FORTH, ttogether with Indian and Japanese colleagues, have published the results of more than 25 years of observations with six of the World…

NASA’s flying observatory reveals magnetic fields of galaxies

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…

What happens when a supermassive black hole destroys a star?

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…

How a black hole launches a jet

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

Revealing the hidden nuclei of galaxies with JWST

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is the largest infrared telescope facility ever sent to space, and is poised to provide a tremendous…

Black hole jet reveals its secrets!

Blazars are some of the brightest objects in the sky. They consist of a…

Pulsation vs Rotation in Be/X-ray binaries

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…

A new pathway for SNe-Ia explosions

It is known that low-mass stars end their lives as white dwarfs, while high-mass stars become…

Understanding Supernova Remnants as populations

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…

The accretion disc size "problem" in Active Galaxies

Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN) are the most powerful, persistent objects in the Universe. They emit enormous amount of…

The first glimpse of galaxies in the eROSITA Final Equatorial-Depth Survey

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

Detection of a Strong Candidate Signal for the Stochastic Gravitational Wave Background at NHz Frequencies

The European Pulsar Timing Array (EPTA) is a scientific collaboration bringing together teams of astronomers around the largest European radio…

The Turbulent Assembly of Hot DOGs

Super-massive black holes (SMBHs), that is black holes with at least one million times the mass of the Sun, are…

Modelling the UV/optical continuum time-lags in AGN

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…

Hunting for the signature of the first moments of the Universe just got more complicated

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…

The source of hard X-rays in black hole binaries

The models that seek to explain the reflection spectrum in black hole binaries usually invoke a point-like primary source of hard…

2020 Highlights

A new probe of Dark Energy

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…

Understanding The Physics Of U/LIRGs With Spitzer

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…

New Icy Planet Detected In Our Nearest Exoplanetary System

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.



2019 Highlights

Crashing Galaxies Drive Huge Shockwaves into Deep Space

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…

Modeling the evolution of a binary system leading to a Neutron Star collision

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…

Inclination effects on the X-ray emission of Galactic black-hole binaries

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

Warped disks during giant outbursts in Be/X-ray binaries: evidence from optical polarimetry

Drs Pablo Reig and Dmitry Blinov of the Institute of Astrophysics  have found the first evidence of precessing warped…

The Musca molecular cloud: An interstellar symphony

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

Cosmic Magnifying Lens Reveals Inner Jets of Black Holes

An international team of astronomers, including Prof. Vasiliki Pavlidou of the Institute of Astrophysics and the Department of Physics of the University of Crete…