Comet 288P, which also bears the designation 2006 VW139, typical of asteroids, belongs to a somewhat strange category of small solar system bodies which falls between comets and asteroids. Objects that make up this group are called Main-belt comets or active asteroids hence their often double designations. Like its marking, the object is also double and is formed by a pair of bodies orbiting each other. In addition both fragments rotate.

Are we facing another astronomical event in 2026?

Today the international LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA Collaboration announces the completion of the fourth observation campaign (called O4) of the international network of gravitational wave detectors. Launched in May 2023, the campaign ends after a period of coordinated observations lasting over two years, during which the analysis of the data was also initiated in parallel.

A pair of very special black hole mergers, detected just one month apart in late 2024, is improving how scientists understand the nature and evolution of the most violent deep-space collisions in our universe. Some features of these mergers point toward the possibility of “second-generation” black holes, i.e. black holes that are the result of earlier coalescences, probably formed in very dense and crowded cosmic environments, like star clusters, where black holes are more likely to run into each other and merge again and again.

Type-II radio bursts are usually observed below 400 MHz with slowly-drifting narrow fundamental and/or harmonic bands. Events with starting frequencies higher than 400 MHz are rarely reported (e.g., Pohjolainen et al. 2008). Such high-frequency Type-IIs may stem from the CME interaction with surrounding dense structures in the corona, such as streamers, ray-like or loop structure, or from sources in the lower corona.

On Friday, November 7, we received the sad news on the passing of Grzegorz Sęk – a teacher, educator, and astronomer also associated with our Observatory.

In August 2025, the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA (LVK) Collaborations released the interferometric strain data from the first part of the fourth observing run (O4a), which ran from May 2023 to January 2024. In this data, we have discovered 128 new confident gravitational-wave signals originating from merging black holes and neutron stars. Alongside the strain data release, we publish version 4.0 of the Gravitational Wave Transient Catalog (GWTC-4.0), which contains lists of the candidate signals and measurements of their properties.

A week ago, during the “II EU Workshop on Water Cherenkov Experiments for Precision Physics” conference co-organized by the OAUJ, Jagiellonian University hosted Japanese physicist Takaaki Kajita, who, together with Canadian Arthur B. McDonald, received the 2015 Nobel Prize in Physics for the discovery of neutrino oscillations. “This discovery has changed our understanding of the deepest secrets of matter and may prove crucial to our understanding of the Universe,” the Nobel Committee explained.