News

On Sunday 8 October 2017, ASTRON & JIVE opened their doors to several hundred visitors during the Weekend of Science. The theme of the day was ‘Looking through radio eyes'. A range of activities enabled visitors to learn about what it means to look through ‘radio eyes', and what needs to happen before astronomers can use their ‘radio eyes'.

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 50th anniversary of the first successful VLBI (Very Long Baseline Interferometry) experiments. VLBI provides astronomers worldwide with the highest available angular resolution of radio sources in space.

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.

Astronomers and astroparticle physicists today are celebrating a €15 million EU funding boost for European telescopes with the launch of the ASTERICS project (Astronomy ESFRI and Research Infrastructure Cluster), which will help solve the Big Data challenges of European astronomy and give members of the public direct interactive access to some of the best of Europe's astronomy images and data.

A European Commission Decision adopted today will allow JIVE, the central facility of the European VLBI Network (EVN), to become an ERIC (short for European Research Infrastructure Consortium), making this international collaboration easier and more efficient. Europe's large radio telescopes regularly observe together in Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI) campaigns in order to explore the Universe with the highest possible angular resolution, mapping out gravitational lenses, resolving supernova explosions, pinpointing black holes and measuring motions and magnetic fields close to newly born stars.

JIVE will host the 3rd International VLBI Technology Workshop in November 2014.

The Joint Institute for VLBI in Europe (JIVE) proved again Thursday that it is not restricted by its name, as it welcomed the National Research Foundation (NRF) of South Africa as a member. JIVE's funding organisations already include the National Astronomical Observatories of China, as well as European national research councils and facilities in France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden and the UK. 

The European radio astronomy collaboration, RadioNet, is recognized as the European entity to give access to and to exploit a number of excellent facilities in this field of astronomical research. The application for funding its latest version - RadioNet3 - has been successful, and a total of 9.5 million Euro have been granted by the European Commission for the years 2012 to 2015. This not only continues the two preceding European projects, but also takes a leap forward including ALMA, the radio interferometer for submillimetre wavelengths in Chile as well as a number of pathfinder programs for the Square Kilometre Array, SKA.