An international team of astronomers studied the jet of material coming from a massive star in the process of formation and found a strong difference between it and jets ejected by low-mass young stars.

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.

Dr. Laurent Loinard, researcher at the Instituto de Radioastronomía y Astrofísica (IRyA), UNAM Campus Morelia, received the 2020 TWAS Award in the area of Earth, Astronomy and Space Sciences. The World Academy of Sciences (TWAS) is an international organism of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, UNESCO.

A group of astronomers led by Dr. Mauricio Gómez-González from the Institute for Radioastronomy and Astrophysics (IRyA) at UNAM Campus Morelia, Mexico, has found an estimated population of around 4000 Wolf-Rayet stars (WR) in the colliding pair of galaxies known as the Antennae, or NGC 4038/39.

The Sloan Digital Sky Survey’s fifth generation collected its very first observations of the cosmos at 1:47 a.m. on October 24, 2020. This groundbreaking all-sky survey will bolster our understanding of the formation and evolution of galaxies—including our own Milky Way—and the supermassive black holes that lurk at their centers.