A European consortium of scientists, led by the FORTH Institute of Astrophysics, has succeeded in securing €3 million in European funding, to design a new state-of-the-art radio telescope and to develop cutting-edge technologies for the analysis of astronomical data.

Locked in an epic cosmic waltz 9 billion light-years away, two supermassive black holes appear to be orbiting around each other every two years.

Last Friday, February 11^th 2022, ESA announced that the SIDLOC beacon was chosen among four experiments to be on board the inaugural flight of Ariane 6, the new rocket currently in the final stages of development for future European space missions.

Dr. Carolina Casadio, Postdoctoral Researcher at the Institute of Astrophysics - FORTH, has been awarded a highly competitive European Research Council (ERC) Starting Grant to study the nature of Dark Matter.

A recent article published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, led by Dr. Kostas Kouroumpatzakis, of the Institute of Astrophysics at the Foundation for Research and Technology, Hellas (IA-FORTH), and the University of Crete, provides new insights into the connection between the X-ray luminosity of accreting black holes and neutron stars and the composition of the stellar populations they are associated with.

Until now, Europe has had two major collaborative networks for ground-based astronomy, one in the optical domain (OPTICON) and the other in the radio-wave domain (RadioNet). These two networks, having successfully served their respective communities over the past twenty years, now come together to form Europe’s largest ground-based astronomy collaborative network. In Greece the network includes the Institute of Astrophysics FORTH and the National Observatory of Athens. During the ORP kick-off meeting on Tuesday 23 March 2021, the Director of the Institute of Astrophysics, Prof. Vassilis Charmandaris, was unanimously elected as Vice Chair of the Board of Directors of the network, having served as Chair of the Board of Directors of the OPTICON network for the past 2 years. The project is coordinated by CNRS (France), together with the University of Cambridge (UK) and the Max-Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy (MPIfR) (Germany) and it involves astronomers from 15 European countries, Australia and South Africa, amounting to 37 institutions.