Astronomy has traditionally required a fair amount of travelling by researchers, as observatories are located around the world. As the pandemic drove people to rely on remote connections, a research group from the University of Turku adopted a new type of arrangement to observe the skies.
An international research team led by the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Turku, Finland, mapped the interstellar magnetic field structure and interstellar matter distribution in the solar neighbourhood. The results of the study have been published in the esteemed European journal Astronomy & Astrophysics (A&A) in March.
Astro-polarimetry is an important method in astronomical observation, aimed at detecting and measuring polarisation of light emitted, reflected, or scattered by astronomical objects such as asteroids, planets, nebulae, stars and exoplanets. The astro-polamiter built with the lead of a research group from the University of Turku made its first observations in July 2019 at the Nordic Optical Telescope on the Canary Islands. In October 2019, the University of Turku becomes the joint owner of the Telescope.