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A small international team of astronomers including Silvia Toonen (UvA) and Gijs Nelemans (Radboud University) has discovered two white dwarf stars orbiting each other that will merge and explode into a type Ia supernova. This missing link of astronomy has long been predicted and has finally been found.

Researchers at TU Delft and Brown University have developed scalable nanotechnology-based lightsails that could support future advances in space exploration and experimental physics. Their research, published in Nature Communications , introduces new materials and production methods to create the thinnest large-scale reflectors ever made.

A group of researchers from TU Delft and the Institute for Planetary Research of the German Aerospace Center have been able to the determinate the Mars-s interior structure and the age of the large ice sheet covering its north pole. They have published their findings in Nature. The team used the same geophysical trick on Mars that geologists use here on Earth to: measure how large areas of land are deformed by the ice sheet that presses down on the planet itself.

The gas sucked in by the iconic supermassive black hole in the galaxy M87 appears to be moving against the black hole's direction of rotation. This is shown by new computer simulations from the Event Horizon Telescope collaboration, which includes researchers from Radboud University. Using observations from 2017 and 2018, the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) Collaboration has deepened our understanding of the supermassive black hole at the center of Messier 87 (M87*).

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.

International research team succeeds for the first time in analysing different signals simultaneously A new method to study the signals associated with merging neutron stars can help researchers to collect data through multiple channels in parallel. The method was developed by an international team of scientists, including the Institute for Gravitational and Subatomic Physics (GRASP) , Utrecht University, and Nikhef.

An international team of researchers including Prof. Badri Krishnan at Radboud University has verified an important property of black holes known as the no-hair theorem using gravitational wave observations. Their research is published in the journal Physical Review Letters. It is a remarkable fact of nature that black holes are extremely simple objects.

Planets like our Earth, including planets with water, could form even in the harshest known star-forming environments, drenched by hard UV light from massive stars. That is a main result of analyses of new observations of such an environment with the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), conducted by, amongst others, Rens Waters and student Lars Cuijpers from Radboud University.

An international team of astronomers, co-led by Michiel Min (SRON), has discovered a silicate-based weather system on a fluffy gas planet around the star WASP-107. It is the first time that scientists, including Rens Waters from Radboud University, find clouds and rain made of sand. They also conclude that the temperature deeper in the atmosphere is rising surprisingly rapid Exoplanet WASP-107b orbits a star that is slightly cooler and lighter than our Sun.

An international team of astronomers including Radboud astronomers Ashley Chrimes, Nicola Gaspari, Andrew Levan, Daniele Bjorn Malesani and Maria Ravasio has discovered heavy elements in the wake of a bright gamma-ray burst in a galaxy about 1 billion light-years away. The burst occurred on March 7, 2023, when two neutron stars merged to form a so-called kilonova.

Using data from Gemini South and other observatories, astronomers have found a new Luminous Fast Blue Optical Transient (LFBOT), a powerful but poorly understood type of cosmic explosion. However, rather than being nestled in a star-forming galaxy like other LFBOTs discovered so far, the latest event, dubbed 'the Finch', occurred in the far outskirts of a galaxy.