An international research team has discovered a celestial system of a type never before observed: a companion orbits a brown dwarf, which in turn orbits a young star. The CRIRES+ instrument and the “viper” software were used to discover this system. Thüringer Landessternwarte is involved in both projects. This illustration shows the system around the star CD-35 2722, with the newly found moon-like object at the centre. The star –– the point source to the left –– has about half the ...

For more than ten years, an international research team involving the universities of Hamburg, Bielefeld, Bochum and Würzburg, as well as the Thuringian State Observatory and the Jülich Computing Centre, observed the northern sky using the LOFAR radio telescope. The researchers have now presented the observational data from this sky survey and published the results in the journal "Astronomy & Astrophysics". The sky survey reveals 13.7 million cosmic radio sources and provides the most complete census yet of active galaxies. An international ...

The Thuringian State Observatory in Tautenburg and the Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Optics and Precision Engineering IOF in Jena are jointly developing a key technology that can be used for astronomical measurements of stars and in modern devices for transmitting encrypted data. The FREEFIB research group is focusing on the development of compact adaptive optics for the efficient feeding of light into a single-mode fiber optic cable. Anyone who has looked up at the starry sky on a clear night is ...

Astronomers at the Thuringian State Observatory have teamed up with international researchers and measured supersonic winds around the equator of WASP-127b, a giant exoplanet. These supersonic jets can reach speeds up to 33.000 kilometers per hour. The discovery provides unique insights into the weather patterns of a distant world. Up until a few years ago, astronomers could only measure the mass and the radius of extrasolar planets (planets around other stars than our Sun). Now, high-resolution instruments like CRIRES+ at the ...

As part of an international consortium, the Thuringian State Observatory has put a new spectrograph into operation. This optical instrument is used to study the activity of stars and discover possible companions. The spectrograph was installed on the modernized 1.52-metre telescope of the European Southern Observatory in La Silla, Chile, in November 2024 and is ready for operation. This means that the Thuringian State Observatory now also has an observation instrument for the night sky of the southern hemisphere. With the ...