news 2024

Astronomers have used data from the European Gaia Space Telescope to discover 55 high-speed stars launched from the young star cluster R136 in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way. This increases tenfold the number of known "runaway stars" in this region. The team of astronomers from the University of Amsterdam, Leiden University and Radboud University (Netherlands), among others, is publishing the results this week in Nature.

A new study led by the National Institute for Astrophysics (INAF), and with contributions from Radboud University's Marijke Haverkorn, has unveiled significant insights into the Milky Way: a magnetised galactic halo. This discovery challenges previous models of our galaxy's structure and evolution.

In new research, TU/e's Mireille Boutin has obtained major results that help improve GPS technologies using unconventional mathematical techniques. The summer holidays are ending, which for many concludes with a long drive home and reliance on GPS devices to get safely home. But every now and then, GPS devices can suggest strange directions or get briefly confused about your location.

The Dutch Black Hole Consortium has launched an 8-language version of the BlackHoleFinder app that citizens all'over the world can use to help identify newly formed black holes. Previously, the app was only available in Dutch and English. Now Spanish, German, Chinese, Bengali, Polish, and Italian have been added, greatly increasing the number of people who can access the citizen science app in their native language.

A team of international scientists, led by Maria Edvige Ravasio of Radboud University, has identified an unprecedented emission line in the brightest gamma-ray burst (GRB) ever recorded. The study, published 26 July in Science, marks a significant advancement in the understanding of GRBs, shedding light on the elusive properties of their jets.

For the first time, a team of scientists from HFML-FELIX at Radboud University has unveiled the cosmic fingerprints of sulfur rings. These results, published in Nature Communications, may shed new light on the way sulfur was transported from dark interstellar clouds (where stars are formed) to young planetary systems and planets like Earth and Venus, and offers ways to search for cosmic sulfur using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST).

New findings from a spaceborne monitoring team of University of Houston, TU Delft and DLR indicates the collapse of the Kakhovka Dam in Ukraine may have been already ongoing before the war with Russia, with deformations in the dam pre-dating the actual collapse. The results were published in the journal Nature Communications Earth and Environment this month.

The period that liquid water was present on the surface of Mars may have been shorter than previously thought. Channel landforms called gullies, previously thought to be formed exclusively by liquid water, can also be formed by the action of evaporating CO2 ice. That is the conclusion of a new study by Lonneke Roelofs, a planetary researcher at Utrecht University.

Cumulus clouds over land start to disappear almost instantly during a partial solar eclipse. Until recently, satellite measurements during the eclipse resulted in dark spots in the cloud map, but researchers from TU Delft and KNMI were able to recover the satellite measurements by using a new method.

The brightness peak of the ring around M87's supermassive black hole has shifted 30 degrees counterclockwise in a year. This is shown in new images released by the Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration. The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) Collaboration , with contributions by Dutch astronomers, has released new images of M87*, the supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy Messier 87, using data from observations taken in April 2018.