Objective of the Advanced Virgo project officially concluded on February 20, 2017 in European Gravitational Observatory (EGO) in Pisa (Italy) was to modernise the Virgo interferometer. Polish scientists participated in the project. It is hoped that the Advanced Virgo detector will significantly advance research on gravitational waves, so far the largest discovery in physics of the 21^st century.

An international team of astronomers (composed also of some Polish scientists) running the VIPERS (VIMOS Public Extragalactic Redshift Survey) project has just presented the largest 3D map of the Universe as it was 7 billion years ago, and made available the data, on which the map was based.

17 teams participated in Hackathon, a programing contest organized for the first time by Ministry of Digital Affairs on premises of National Library in Warsaw. 90 contest runners included 2 astrophysicist from NCBJ: Adam Zadrożny and Arkadiusz Ćwiek. Contest runners’ task was to develop software applications designed to facilitate everyday life of ordinary people by making use of data openly published by various institutions in the Internet.

On December 26, 2015 at 03:38:53 UTC the LIGO Scientific Collaboration and the Virgo collaboration observed gravitational waves – ripples in the fabric of spacetime – for the second time. The gravitational waves were detected by both of the twin Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) detectors, located in Livingston, Louisiana, and Hanford, Washington, USA.

For the first time in history scientists have observed some “wrinkles” on the spacetime “fabric”. These gravitational waves have arrived to Earth from a distant point in the Universe where some catastrophic event had taken place. The observation has confirmed one of the most profound consequences of the General Theory of Relativity proposed by Einstein in 1915 and has opened up quite new perspectives in research on the Universe.

70 cosmology researchers from the entire world – among them some world-famous scientists – are going to attend Symposium to be held between August 24-28 in Warsaw in commemoration of the most famous Polish cosmologist – late Professor Roman Juszkiewicz.