Radiation that travelled through space for longer than the Sun and Earth have existed has now been captured by the LST-1 and MAGIC telescopes in the Canary Islands. It was emitted by the active galactic nucleus OP 313, powered by a massive black hole. No one has yet observed a more distant active galactic nucleus in the ultra-high-energy range.
In the last week of July, scientists from around the world converged on Prague. At the 11th Frontiers of Quantum and Mesoscopic Thermodynamics conference (FQMT'26), they explored what quantum mechanics tells us about the world today and how to turn it into the technologies of tomorrow.
The 2026 EPS Europhysics Prize for outstanding contributions to condensed matter physics was awarded to Libor Šmejkal, Jairo Sinova, and Tomáš Jungwirth for their discovery of altermagnetism.
On Sunday, July 5, 2026, Jan Hladký died at the age of 91, shy of his 92nd birthday. A physicist who devoted nearly seven decades to science, he made his mark on the international history of particle physics through his discoveries.
Dr. Chang-Jong Kang from Chungnam National University, South Korea, visited FZU within the GAČR project SMTM-BEST to strengthen collaboration in the field of strongly correlated quantum materials.
A Czech team of secondary school students from Hlučín, Plzeň and Prague won a gold medal at the international round of the Young Physicists' Tournament (IYPT), hosted by Zurich, Switzerland, from 5 to 12 July.
On the night of June 30, a large survey telescope designed to map the ever-changing universe began full-scale operations at the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile. This marks a major shift in how we gather knowledge about our planet’s immediate and distant surroundings. Over the course of three nights, the telescope captures images of the entire southern sky—and it will repeat this process for ten years. As a result, we will obtain an astronomical amount of data and records of what changes in the sky and how. This will allow us to explore the universe in ways that were previously inaccessible to us.
Most wireless electronics would not work without varactors. An international team that includes Czech physicists has now developed a material for them that lets electronics use less energy. The study appeared in the prestigious journal Nature Electronics.
