News

Observing proposals are invited for the European VLBI Network, a VLBI network of radio telescopes spread throughout Europe and beyond, operated by an international consortium of institutes. Deadline 1st October 2017.

Ghana and South Africa have announced the first successful detection of fringes during a VLBI (Very Long Baseline Interferometry) test experiment with the European VLBI Network (EVN). A 32 metre converted telecommunications antenna at Kutunse, Ghana, was used in the ‘first fringe' detection. The experiment is one of three positive detections, with the other two successes including methanol maser detection and pulsar observations.

After serving as the director of JIVE for a decade, Huib van Langevelde will continue his career at JIVE in a different role. The council of the JIV-ERIC accepted his aspiration to spend more time on science and development, and they are beginning the process of selecting a new director. After serving JIVE in various roles, Huib van Langevelde took on the responsibility of acting director in 2007 and then the position of director in 2008.

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.