News

The discovery of an extremely energetic gamma-ray burst from the infant Universe

An international effort led by INAF researcher Andrea Rossi discovered and followed up the gamma-ray burst GRB 210905A, one of the most luminous events ever recorded that exploded when our Universe was just less than 900 million years old

A new milestone for the HEMERA Program

During August in Timmins, Canada, the Canadian Space Agency (CSA) and the Centre national d'études spatiales (CNES) have managed to launch in rapid sequence 4 balloons in the stratosphere, up to ceiling altitudes greater than 30km

GRB 190829A - A Showcase of Binary Late Evolution

AN UNEXPECTED GAMMA-RAY BURST

An international group led by INAF researchers have confirmed that the gamma-ray burst GRB 200826A, which lasted less than two seconds – typical of short bursts – is associated with the explosion of a massive star, which is typical of long gamma-ray bursts

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 final catalogue of the Gaia-ESO Survey is public

ESO has just released the final catalogue of the Gaia-ESO Survey (GES), a large public spectroscopic survey carried out with the Very Large Telescope (VLT) of the European Southern Observatory in Chile. INAF has played a key role in all the aspects of the survey.

AN ARTIFICIAL EYE FOR BILLIONS OF GALAXIES SAMPLES

An international group of scientists, including researchers from the Italian National Institute for Astrophysics, has used artificial intelligence (AI) to measure the size of galaxies as far away as about seven billion light-years from Earth

The NEOROCKS project: online the newsletter first issue

NEOROCKS (Near-Earth Object Rapid Observation, Characterization and Key Simulations) is an European project financed by the Horizon 2020 UE program. The first issue of the project newsletter is an online magazine to report about news in the NEO field

First light for SiFAP4XP

SiFAP4XP is a new fast photometer with polarimetric capabilities at the TNG Telescope. The project was triggered by the challenging goal to observe in the optical domain the same targets of the IXPE satellite, the first to be specifically dedicated to X-ray polarimetric observations

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

Radio evidence of a minor merger in the Shapley supercluster

A group of radio astronomers led by INAF has conducted a multi-frequency and multi-band study of the Shapley Supercluster, where the formation of large structures is ongoing at the present cosmological age. Radio astronomers have discovered a radio emission that acts as a "bridge" between a cluster of galaxies and a group of galaxies

Multiwavelength snapshot of a repeating fast radio burst

With a multiwavelength campaign, a group of astronomers led by the Italian National Institute for Astrophysics (INAF) studied a repeating fast radio burst (FRB). The object FRB20201124A, discovered in November 2020, reactivated in March 2021, emitting a series of radio bursts

Classifying Seyfert Galaxies with Deep Learning

Scientist uses deep learning to identify low luminous Seyfert 1.9 galaxies that are usually missed by human inspection among ten thousands of spectra. These results are published in the Astrophysical Journal Supplement Series by Yen Chen Chen, in the department of physics at Sapienza University of Rome and ICRANet

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!

Gaia draws a new map of the galactic spirals

An international team led by researchers of the the Italian National Institute for Astrophysics (INAF) has compiled the most detailed map yet of the Milky Way’s spiral structure within about 16,000 light years from the Sun, by making use of the position and brightness of around 600,000 young stars measured by Gaia, the European Space Agency’s star surveyor

The morphology of the X-ray afterglows and of the jetted GeV emission in long gamma-ray bursts

In a new article published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, an ICRA-ICRANet research team (some of them INAF associates) sheds light on the mass and spin of stellar-mass BHs from an extensive analysis of long-duration GRBs

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

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