News and events

US approval for Reflect Orbital’s plan to put reflecting satellites into orbit in order to reflect light from the sun into Earth has reignited a heated debate among astronomers, space scientists and ecologists. The company says it has received more than 260,000 inquiries from customers wanting redirected sunlight for energy, disaster relief, agriculture, defence and city lighting. Researchers warn that if the project grows from a few demonstrators to a constellation of tens of thousands, the consequences for ground- and space-based astronomy, orbital safety and nocturnal ecosystems could be severe.

In a major step toward understanding how the first supermassive black holes and galaxies formed, the Euclid Consortium reports the discovery of 31 previously unknown quasars at redshifts 6.6–7.8, including the most distant quasar known to date. These objects shine from when the Universe was only around 5% of its current age!

On 23 March 2025, Euclid’s VIS camera produced a 4.8-square-degree mosaic that images more than 60 million stars in unprecedented detail — giving astronomers the resolution and sky coverage needed to measure the masses of cold worlds outside the Solar System.

The mission enters its critical design phase ahead of a 2030 launch.

Coming from the sunny shores of Tenerife to the changing seasons of Norway, doctoral research fellow Oscar Soler is embarking on a new adventure—exploring the physics of our closest star at the Rosseland Centre for Solar Physics (RoCS).

José Ricardo Correia arrived in Oslo in September 2025 to become a postdoctoral researcher at ITA. A Portuguese physicist with a master’s (2016) and PhD (2022) from the University of Porto, he now works with the Cosmology group to model the violent phase transitions that may have rippled through the infant Universe.