Thursday, October 15, 2026

A new era in exploring the extreme universe: The large-sized telescope sub-array is inaugurated on CTAO-north

Cherenkov Telescope Array

LST Sub-Array at Sunset — image:
The four Large-Sized Telescopes (LSTs) will form the core of the CTAO-North array at the Roque de los Muchachos Observatory in La Palma, Spain.
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Credit: LST Collaboration

La Palma, Spain, 15 October 2026 – Two hundred and fifty scientists and representatives from leading research institutions around the world celebrated the inauguration of the Large-Sized Telescope (LST) sub-array at the CTAO-North site at the Roque de los Muchachos Observatory in La Palma, Spain. The completion of the four telescopes marks a significant milestone for the global astrophysics community and represents a crucial step toward the full scientific operation of the Cherenkov Telescope Array Observatory (CTAO).

Each telescope features a 23-meter-diameter reflector and is equipped with state-of-the-art ultra-fast cameras. Designed to detect the faint Cherenkov light flashes when very high-energy gamma rays interact with the Earth's atmosphere, the LSTs are the most sensitive instruments in the world for observing gamma rays at energies between approximately 20 gigaelectronvolts (GeV) and several teraelectronvolts (TeV).

This exceptional sensitivity is crucial for detecting distant and transient gamma-ray sources. As very high-energy gamma rays are increasingly absorbed as they travel across the Universe, the LSTs’ low-energy threshold enables scientists to probe sources at cosmological distances, to look further back in cosmic history, and to see the very short variability of dynamically evolving gamma-ray sources with greater statistical accuracy.

A productive pioneer: the LST-1

Even during its commissioning phase, the Large-Sized Telescope prototype (LST-1) has produced groundbreaking results since 2020. These include observations of pulsars, studies of active galactic nuclei at cosmological distances, and rapid follow-up observations of transient phenomena such as novae and gamma-ray bursts.

With the three new LSTs (LST-2, LST-3, and LST-4) joining the existing LST-1, the four telescopes will become a true array. By observing the same gamma-ray showers simultaneously from multiple directions, the sub-array will provide substantially improved sensitivity, angular resolution, and energy reconstruction, opening up a new level of precision in the study of the gamma-ray Universe.

"The completion of the LST sub-array is the culmination of more than fifteen years of international collaboration and technological innovation," said Prof. Masahiro Teshima, the Principal Investigator of the LST Collaboration and Spokesperson of the CTAO Consortium. "These telescopes will allow us to explore some of the most extreme environments in the Universe, including supermassive black holes, neutron stars, the possible origins of cosmic rays, and the nature of dark matter."

Reaching out to the early Universe

The LSTs form the low-energy core of CTAO-North and will provide a unique opportunity to probe the Universe at an epoch roughly 12 billion years ago, when it was less than two billion years old. Their sensitivity to the lowest-energy gamma rays will enable the detection and study of bright VHE gamma-ray bursts at high redshift, potentially extending gamma-ray observations to sources at redshifts of around z∼4, and providing new insights into the early Universe.

Over the coming years, the LSTs will undergo commissioning and integration into CTAO operations. Alongside the other CTAO telescopes, planned for both of its arrays, they will address fundamental questions in astrophysics, particle physics, and cosmology, such as the nature of dark matter, the origin of cosmic rays, and the physics of extreme cosmic accelerators.

About the LST Collaboration

The Large-Sized Telescope (LST) Collaboration is an international consortium of scientists, engineers, and institutions dedicated to designing, constructing, and commissioning the LSTs for the CTAO. The collaboration has developed advanced technologies in optics, photodetectors, mechanics, and high-speed electronics to achieve the lowest energy threshold ever reached by ground-based gamma-ray observatories.

The project was made possible by a strong international partnership, involving institutions from Brazil, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Croatia, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Poland, Spain, and Switzerland.

About the CTAO

The CTAO (Cherenkov Telescope Array Observatory; www.ctao.org) will be the world’s largest and most powerful observatory for gamma-ray astronomy. The CTAO’s unprecedented accuracy and broad energy range (20 GeV- 300 TeV) will help to address some of the most perplexing questions in astrophysics, falling under three major themes: understanding the origin and role of relativistic cosmic particles; probing extreme environments, such as black holes or neutron stars; and exploring frontiers in physics, searching for dark matter or deviations from Einstein’s theory of relativity.

To cover its broad energy range, the CTAO will use three types of telescopes: the Large-Sized Telescope (LST), the Medium-Sized Telescope (MST), and the Small-Sized Telescope (SST). More than 60 telescopes will be distributed between two observation stations: CTAO-North in the northern hemisphere at the Roque de los Muchachos Observatory on La Palma, Spain, and CTAO-South in the southern hemisphere at the Paranal Observatory in the Atacama Desert, Chile.

The CTAO is a Big Data project. The Observatory will generate hundreds of petabytes (PB) of data in a year (~12 PB after compression). Based on its commitment to Open Science, the CTAO will be the first gamma-ray observatory of its kind to operate as an open, proposal-driven observatory providing public access to its high-level science data and software products.

The CTAO Central Organisation (legally, the CTAO ERIC) is in charge of the construction and operation of the Observatory, as well as the management of the CTAO’s four sites. The CTAO ERIC members include Austria, Croatia, the Czech Republic, the European Southern Observatory (ESO), France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Slovenia, Spain, and Switzerland. The Netherlands is also part of the CTAO ERIC as Observer. Further contributing countries — Australia, Brazil, Japan, South Africa, and the United States — are engaged in the process of joining the CTAO ERIC as Strategic Partners or Third Parties.

This group works in close cooperation with partners from around the world, including In-Kind Contribution Collaborations that are developing essential hardware and software, as well as the CTAO Consortium, a group of researchers who works on the scientific exploitation of the Observatory.

About the LST Collaboration

About the CTAO

The four Large-Sized Telescopes (LSTs), located in bottom right of photo, form the core of the CTAO-North array at the Roque de Los Muchachos Observatory on the island of La Palma.

The four Large-Sized Telescopes (LSTs), which are the cluster of four telescopes on the right, feature 23-meter-diameter reflectors and are equipped with state-of-the-art ultra-fast cameras. Designed to detect the faint Cherenkov light flashes when very high-energy gamma rays interact with the Earth's atmosphere, the LSTs are the most sensitive instruments in the world for observing gamma rays at energies between approximately 20 gigaelectronvolts (GeV) and several teraelectronvolts (TeV).

Credit

LST Collaboration

‘Highly sensitive’ people may not experience everything more intensely, study suggests

Washington State University

PULLMAN, Wash. — Environmental sensitivity may be a misleading name for a personality trait that appears to have less to do with how people respond to their physical environments and more to do with how they are affected by social experiences and perceived threats.

A new Washington State University study published in the Journal of Environmental Psychology found that people who score highly on measures of environmental sensitivity – often called highly sensitive people – are no more emotionally reactive to everyday conditions such as uncomfortable temperatures, unpleasant smells or noisy streets than their less sensitive counterparts.

Instead, the research suggests that highly sensitive people are particularly attuned to social cues and signs of safety or potential threats. For example, a street littered with trash or covered in graffiti might trigger a greater sense of unease, while a neighborhood where people interact warmly could provide a stronger emotional boost.

For people who identify as highly sensitive, the findings could be reassuring, said Kim Meidenbauer, an assistant professor of psychology at WSU and lead author of the study. Having the trait doesn’t necessarily mean reacting more strongly to every aspect of one’s surroundings.

“For people who do identify as highly sensitive, it’s actually kind of nice to know that you’re not necessarily going to have a stronger emotional response to all parts of your environment,” Meidenbauer said. “It seems like it’s more about social environments than the physical environment.”

Environmental sensitivity is a personality trait associated with feeling the effects of positive and negative experiences more intensely than others. Highly sensitive people tend to react more strongly to stress and adversity but may also benefit more from supportive relationships and positive experiences.

Research has also linked the trait to genetics. A previous study of nearly 2,900 teenage twins found that genetics may explain nearly half of the differences in how sensitive people are to their surroundings.

Most previous research has focused on how highly sensitive people respond to childhood experiences, trauma and other major life events. Meidenbauer and her colleagues wanted to know whether heightened sensitivity also extends to ordinary physical surroundings.

To find out, they analyzed more than 3,800 surveys completed by Chicago residents who used a smartphone app to record their emotions and rate conditions in outdoor neighborhoods and parks.

The researchers found that perceived safety, orderliness and friendly interactions among nearby people were more strongly associated with positive emotions in highly sensitive participants. But they found no evidence that the personality trait amplified emotional responses to physical conditions such as air quality, temperature or noise.

That distinction raises questions about what being highly sensitive actually means. The standard questionnaire used to identify the trait may be telling researchers more about how people handle emotional and social experiences than how they respond to the physical world. In other words, scientists may have been measuring a different kind of sensitivity than the name implies.

Meidenbauer cautioned that the results don’t rule out stronger reactions to extreme conditions, such as dangerous heat or severe air pollution. Her laboratory is now investigating whether other personality traits and individual preferences for hot or cold weather can better explain why people respond differently to the same environmental conditions.

For now, the research raises a more fundamental question about what it really means to be highly sensitive. Rather than experiencing everything around them more intensely, highly sensitive people may simply be more affected by the human experiences that make a place feel welcoming or threatening.

Journal

Journal of Environmental Psychology

DOI

10.1016/j.jenvp.2026.103229

Article Title

Sensitive to what? Environmental sensitivity moderates affective associations with perceived safety, order, and social context

Early tetrapods had surprisingly little ability to move their necks

Uppsala University

Tetrapod and sturgeon — image:
An artist’s interpretation of the study.
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Credit: Vic Putinski

A new model has made it possible to estimate how the backbones of some of the first animals on land could and could not move using sturgeon as a material analogue. These results disprove a long-standing hypothesis that changes in early tetrapod anatomy as they moved onto land gave them improved neck mobility. The study, led by a researcher at Uppsala University, formerly of Carleton University in Canada, has been published in the journal Nature.

Researchers have overturned a long-standing hypothesis that our ancestors, the early tetrapods, gained increased neck mobility early on in their transition to land. In fish, the shoulder blades are attached to the skull. In the early tetrapods, however, the shoulders became detached sometime in the Devonian Period and we acquired a new region of neck vertebrae separating these two parts of the skeleton. It has been reasonably assumed for decades that this separation must have allowed the head to move more freely, so the hypothesis that neck mobility was an evolutionary driver for this change in the tetrapod body plan has prevailed.

But the structure of early tetrapods’ backbones is very unusual compared to most vertebrates today, making it hard to model how they moved. They keep a long rod of tissue called the notochord for their whole lives that runs through the whole vertebral column, so their actual vertebrae are small and arranged around a large tube of soft tissue. Because this soft tissue behaves differently from joints between vertebrae that are typical today, scientists have not been able to test the neck mobility hypothesis. In this new study, though, researchers came up with a way of modeling early tetrapod neck mobility using a distantly related fish, the sturgeon, that has the same kind of backbone. By applying the material properties of sturgeon notochordal backbones to fossil animals, researchers have found that early tetrapod necks were surprisingly stiff and, even free of surrounding bones, they would not have allowed much mobility.

“We know that tetrapods did eventually gain higher neck mobility so these results push that gain-of-function forward in time and up the evolutionary tree from where we previously thought it occurred. Clearly it was advantageous eventually, but it was not an advantage available to these early tetrapods yet because of the limitations of their anatomy,” says lead author Dana Korneisel.

To figure this out, the researchers first had to dissect out the backbones of sturgeon to bend and twist them on a Universal Testing Machine. They spent three days testing batches of three or four at a time, cutting out first the whole backbone and then sections of the notochord to test both tissues. From these test data, they calculated the material stiffness of the sturgeon tissues and then applied this stiffness to extinct animals.

“If you can measure the size and shape of both the thing you are testing and the part of the animal you want to model mobility of, it all comes down to dividing out the sturgeon number and multiplying by the fossil number,” says Korneisel.

“I undertook this study to find out how big of a difference this change in anatomy made for these animals” she continues, referring to the separation of the head from the shoulders, “even while performing the dissections on sturgeon and handling their vertebral columns, which are built a lot like those of early tetrapods, I felt that the tissue wasn’t terribly stiff. So, after doing the math, the lack of significant head mobility for almost all of these animals was a huge surprise”.

Korneisel emphasizes that all of these estimates are based on just the backbone, so actual mobility will have been less than the estimates presented here because of all of the tissues that surround the backbone like muscles, skin, and for many of these animals, bones embedded in the skin. And what about looking up or turning the head?

“Head elevation in these animals was no more than what you would expect in fish, and sometimes even less. We found that the kind of head twisting that we can do when we shake our heads was not feasible in any of these animals.”

Where might this go in the future? Notochordal vertebral columns are rare today, but they were very common throughout life’s history on earth. The researchers also collected data on the whole vertebral column of sturgeon, not just the front-most part, so mobility could be estimated for other parts of the body of early tetrapods or for a number of other extinct groups provided a good enough reconstruction of the skeleton can be made from the known fossils.

Dana Korniesel dissecting a sturgeon.