Scientific Highlights

LIGO and Virgo Announce Four New Gravitational-Wave Detections

December 3, 2018

The LIGO and Virgo collaborations have now confidently detected gravitational waves from a total of 10 stellar-mass binary black hole mergers and one merger of neutron stars, which are the dense, spherical remains of stellar explosions. Six of the black hole merger events had been reported before, while four are newly announced.

EU Particle Physics & Astronomy commit to the Research Data Revolution making the European Open Science Cloud a reality

December 3, 2018

The European project ESCAPE, funded with 16 million euros, will provide open data from astrophysics and particle physics large facilities, such as the LHC or the Cherenkov Telescope Array (CTA)

IFAE joins the VIRGO collaboration

November 14, 2018

IFAE just became a new member institution inside the VIRGO collaboration. This opens a new long-term research line in IFAE related to GWs detection using terrestrial interferometry.

Cosmic fireworks from a new gamma-ray binary

November 13, 2018

A joint observational campaign with the MAGIC telescopes and the VERITAS array , has detected a new source emitting very-high-energy gamma rays from an unusual system consisting of a massive star and a pulsar

The First Telescope on a Cherenkov Telescope Array Site Makes its Debut

October 10, 2018

On Wednesday, 10 October 2018, more than 200 guests from around the world gathered on the northern array site of the Cherenkov Telescope Array (CTA) to celebrate the inauguration of the first prototype Large-Sized Telescope (LST).

First particle tracks seen in prototype for international neutrino experiment

September 18, 2018

The largest liquid-argon neutrino detector in the world has just recorded its first particle tracks, signaling the start of a new chapter in the story of the international Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE).

ATLAS observes elusive Higgs boson decay to a pair of bottom quarks

August 28, 2018

Six years after its discovery, the Higgs boson has at last been observed decaying to fundamental particles known as bottom quarks.

MAGIC telescopes trace origin of a rare cosmic neutrino

July 12, 2018

For the first time, astrophysicists have localized the source of a high energy cosmic neutrino originating outside the Milky Way. It is highly likely that the neutrino comes from a blazar in the Orion constellation.

ATLAS observes direct interaction of Higgs boson with top quark

June 4, 2018

New results from the ATLAS experiment at the LHC reveal how strongly the Higgs boson interacts with the heaviest known elementary particle, the top quark.