Events

Stellar evolution along the HR diagram with Gaia

The hybrid workshop started its activities in the INAF National Auditorium “Ernesto Capocci” of the Capodimonte Astronomical Observatory in Naples

Announcing the new Director of the Large Binocular Telescope

The Large Binocular Telescope Observatory, one of the largest and most advanced optical telescopes in the world, is proud to announce the appointment of its new Director, Prof. Joseph Shields, who will assume the position effective June 06, 2022

The operational phase begins for the CUBES spectrograph

The operational phase begins for the CUBES (Cassegrain U-Band Efficient Spectrograph) project, an innovative ultraviolet spectrograph to be installed on the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope (ESO's VLT) at the Paranal Observatory in Chile

The long journey of human missions to Mars and back to Earth

The Embassy of Italy, in collaboration with the Italian Cultural Institute in Sydney and the Australian Academy of Science, invites you to an Italian Night with Five Southern Stars!

The best place and time to live in the Milky Way

More than 6 billion years ago, the outskirts of the Milky Way were the safest places for the development of possible life forms, sheltered from the most violent explosions in the universe: gamma-ray bursts and supernovae. This is demonstrated by a new study, led by researchers from INAF and the University of Insubria in Italy, which investigates the incidence of these events throughout the evolution of our galaxy

Magnetic anomalies on the young craters of Mercury

It is possible to find a point of convergence between geophysics and planetary geology, and a group of researchers led by Valentina Galluzzi from INAF did so by analyzing the crustal magnetic field of the planet Mercury, focusing on some anomalies identified nearby two recently formed craters

JUICE: JANUS SENT ITS FIRST IMAGES ACQUIRED IN SPACE

The instrument Jovis, Amorum ac Natorum Undique Scrutator (JANUS) passed the commissioning phase with full marks. It is a real test during which - 8 million km from the Earth - it opened its electronic "eyes", sending the so-called "first light", i.e. his first series of images, to the technicians and researchers

A “cosmic microscope” reveals the origin of galactic winds produced by supermassive black holes

By studying a sample of distant galaxies, whose light reaches us from a cosmic epoch when the Universe was just three billion years old, a team of researchers led by Giustina Vietri (INAF) has followed the winds blowing in “active” galaxies down to only a few light-years from the supermassive black holes that sit in the galactic cores

INAF joins the MeerKAT+ Project

The South African Radio Astronomy Observatory and the Max-Planck-Gesellschaft welcome the Italian Istituto Nazionale di Astrofisica as partner on the MeerKAT extension project

A new class of Einstein crosses unveiled

An international team of astronomers has found a new class of Einstein crosses, where massive elliptical galaxies produces multiple, cross-shaped images of far away galaxies called “blue nuggets”

VST beyond 2021

From Apr 2022 the INAF-ESO agreement for the VST operations in Paranal will expire, and INAF will gain full ownership of the telescope. To explore the various options, INAF has appointed a working group to review the scientific potential of the VST telescope and to present to the INAF management the potential options on the future of telecope operations

ALMA shed light on the chemical composition of a protoplanetary disk

The team led by Linda Podio, a researcher at INAF, observed a protoplanetary disk of less than 1 million years, which is almost edge-on. The edge-on geometry allowed observing the vertical structure of the disk and to resolve distinct chemical layers. The images obtained thanks to ALMA revealed emission from several molecules. One of these is methanol, a key molecule for the formation of the so-called “complex organic molecules”

Prof. Nichi D'Amico, President of the Italian National Institute for Astrophysics passed away at 67

From Raphael’s skies to the skies of the Third Millennium

When History of Art meets Astrophysics. Tuesday, September 1st 2020 at 7pm. Palazzo Ducale, Sala del Consiglio Maggiore. With Francesca Matteucci and Elizabeth Vermeer

Ultraviolet light vs. COVID19: from the Sun to artificial lamps the germicidal power of ultraviolet rays against the pandemic

Results of a study carried out by the Italian National Institute for Astrophysics (INAF) and the University of Milan, in collaboration with Istituto Nazionale Tumori and the Don Gnocchi Foundation of Milan, demonstrate the high germicidal power of short ultraviolet radiation (UV-C) on SARS-COV-2 coronavirus. This result has important public health implications on the strategies to be adopted to manage the pandemic and clearly explain how decontamination and sterilization protocols to prevent SARS-Cov-2 infection must be designed. Notably, taking off from these results a second study explains the role of Sun-derived UV-B/A in conditioning the epidemiology and the worldwide evolution of the COVID-19 pandemic

III Italy-Ukraine Scientific Meeting “Are We Alone in the Universe?”

A Virtual Conference on the Occasion of the Italian Research Day in the World

Where's there's one, there's one hundred more

PSO J030947.49+271757.31 is the most distant Blazar observed to date. The light we see from it began its journey when the Universe was less than 1 billion years old, almost 13 billion years ago. The blazar was discovered by a team of researchers led by Silvia Belladitta, a PhD student at the University of Insubria, working for the Italian National Institute for Astrophysics (INAF) in Milan

The New Year’s Day meteorite has been found

For the first time in Italy a meteorite is recovered through systematic monitoring, thanks to the PRISMA network, promoted and coordinated by INAF

ASTRI: a new pathfinder of the arrays of Cherenkov telescopes

On June 12nd 2019, in La Laguna (Tenerife, Spain) Prof. Nichi D’Amico, President of the Italian National Institute for Astrophysics (INAF), and Prof. Rafael Rebolo Lopez, Director of the Instituto de Astrofisica de Canaries, signed a Record of Understanding to enter a detailed negotiation on a technical and programmatic basis aimed to install and operate the ASTRI Mini-Array at the Observatorio del Teide

Important industrial contract assigned in the context of the ASTRI gamma-ray astronomy project

The National Institute for Astrophysics takes another important step towards the creation of the ASTRI range mini-array of telescopes, assigning to Hamamatsu Photonics Italia the tender for the realization of silicon sensors that will equip the cameras with images of the innovative double-mirror telescopes "Made in INAF", for an amount exceeding one million euros