News

An international team anchored by the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) Collaboration, which is known for capturing the first image of a black hole in the galaxy Messier 87, has now imaged the heart of the nearby radio galaxy Centaurus A in unprecedented detail. The astronomers pinpoint the location of the central supermassive black hole and reveal how a gigantic jet is being born. Most remarkably, only the outer edges of the jet seem to emit radiation, which challenges our theoretical models of jets. This work, led by Michael Janssen from the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Bonn and Radboud University Nijmegen is published in Nature Astronomy on 19 July 2021.

The JIVE Annual Report 2020 is now available. It presents a summary of JIVE’s many activities throughout the year.

On Tuesday 29 June 2021, the Special Session "Extreme astrophysics at extremely high resolution" will highlight the latest scientific results of high-resolution radio instruments, such as the European VLBI Network (EVN) and similar arrays, with particular focus on the synergies with high resolution and high energy phenomena across the electromagnetic spectrum. The session is being organised with the support of the H2020 JUMPING JIVE project as part of the European Astronomical Society 2021 (EAS 2021) Annual Meeting held virtually from 28 June to 2 July 2021.

The May 2021 issue of the EVN/JIVE Newsletter is now available and includes relevant updates of the European VLBI Network (EVN). The May 2021 Newsletter can be accessed here.

An online EVN Mini-Symposium and Users Meeting will be held during July 12-14, 2021. The EVN Symposium normally takes place every two years, and is the main forum for discussion of the latest Very Long Baseline Interferometry scientific results and technical and technological developments within the EVN member countries.

Two international teams of astronomers (with significant JIVE involvement) have narrowed-down the origin of the flashes produced in the famous fast radio burst FRB20180916B by examining them with the highest time resolution and at the lowest possible frequencies.

In April 2019, scientists released the first image of a black hole in the galaxy M87 using the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT). However, that remarkable achievement was just the beginning of the science story to be told. Scientists from JIVE contributed to this global effort.

All supermassive black holes in the centres of galaxies appear to have periods when they swallow matter from their close surroundings. But that is about as far as the similarities go. That's the conclusion reached by British and Dutch astronomers from their research with ultra-sensitive radio telescopes in a well-studied region of the universe. They publish their findings in two articles in the international journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.

Francisco Colomer, Director of JIVE ERIC, has been elected as the new Chair of the ERIC Forum. With the support of members from the Executive Board, he will be in charge of the strategic management and planning of the ERIC Forum, strengthening its dialogue and relations with key stakeholders such as the European Commission and the ESFRI.

The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) collaboration, who produced the first ever image of a black hole, has revealed today a new view of the massive object at the centre of the M87 galaxy: how it looks in polarised light. This is the first time astronomers have been able to measure polarisation, a signature of magnetic fields, this close to the edge of a black hole. The observations are key to explaining how the M87 galaxy, located 55 million light-years away, is able to launch energetic jets from its core.