Achievements

An unprecedented study conducted across 43 European sites by an international scientific team coordinated by Université Grenoble Alpes, in collaboration with the CNRS, Inserm, and the French National Research Institute for Sustainable Development (IRD), reveals in Nature (22 October 2025) that the ability of airborne particles to generate oxidative stress in the lungs (known as the oxidative potential, or OP) varies according to environmental type (urban, rural, industrial, etc.) and emission sources.

On January 8, 2025, the European Commission announced on its official website that the European Research Infrastructure Consortium for the "Cherenkov Telescope Array Observatory" (CTAO ERIC) was set up on January 7, 2025.

Associate of the Center for Astrophysics and Cosmology and professor of astronomy at the School of Science of the University of Nova Gorica, Dr. Andreja Gomboc, was part of the team that discovered the most massive stellar black hole in our Galaxy to date using the European Space Agency's Gaia satellite.

A new catalog produced by a French-led international team of astronomers shows that NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope has discovered 294 gamma-ray-emitting pulsars, while another 34 suspects await confirmation. This is 27 times the number known before the mission launched in 2008.

A new study involving Dr. Tanja Petrushevska of the Center for Astrophysics and Cosmology at the University of Nova Gorica reports what they believe to be the largest explosion ever detected.

The academic publishing house Springer has issued the monograph Representation Learning: Propositionalization and Embeddings, written by Prof. Dr. Nada Lavrač from the Jozef Stefan Institute and the University of Nova Gorica; Dr. Vid Podpečan from the Jozef Stefan Institute; and Prof. Dr. Marko Robnik-Šikonja, from the Faculty of Computer and Information Science, University of Ljubljana.

In a set of papers, published on January 13, 2021 in Nature and Nature Astronomy, multiple international science teams concluded that the blast came from a supermagnetized stellar remnant known as a magnetar located in a neighboring galaxy.

Starting with October 2020, Prof. Dr. Irina Cristea, acting head of the Centre for Information Technologies and Applied Mathematics at University of Nova Gorica, is the new Chief-editor of the “Italian Journal of Pure and Applied Mathematics”, edited by Forum Editrice Universitaria Udinese.

The nature of dark matter, the substance that accounts for more than 85% of all matter in the Universe, remains a mystery. Many theories predict that dark matter is made up from yet - undiscovered fundamental particles. A plethora of ground-based and space born experiments are looking for traces of these particles. A new study involving Tanja Petrushevska of the Center for Astrophysics and Cosmology at the University of Nova Gorica shows how researchers can use explosions of stars outside of our Milky Way to search for a particular class of dark matter particles.

Ten years after the first edition, the world-renowned Oxford University Press published the second edition of the scientific monograph of the associate of the University of Nova Gorica, and the Karst Research Institute ZRC SAZU from Postojna, Prof. Dr. Tanja Pipan, The Biology of Caves and Other Subterranean Habitats (Biologija jam in drugih podzemeljskih habitatov).

A fully coherent source of intense soft x-ray pulses

Today, the Rector of the University of Nova Gorica, Prof. Dr. Danilo Zavrtanik, and the Director of Institute CES, inštitut znanosti in tehnologije, d.o.o., mag. inž. el. Nina Gramc, concluded the Agreement based on which the University of Nova Gorica sold the patent rights for the method for "solid-state grid energy storage" invention to Institute CES, inštitut znanosti in tehnologije, d.o.o..

The signature of the agreement between the Cherenkov Telescope Array Observatory (CTAO) and the European Southern Observatory (ESO) on December 19, 2018, in Santiago de Chile, eliminated the last formal obstacle to the construction of the South CTA observatory in the Chilean Atacama desert.

In a research, performed by the Fermi LAT collaboration, with participation from Dr. Gabrijela Zaharijas, from the Centre for Astrophysics and Cosmology at the University of Nova Gorica, scientists used gamma rays to measure the total amount of starlight produced over the last 90% of the Universes history (last 12 billion years).

A Caltech-led team of researchers that included a researcher from the Center for Astrophysics and Cosmology of the University of Nova Gorica Dr. Tanja Petrushevska, has observed the peculiar death of a massive star that exploded in a surprisingly faint and rapidly fading supernova.

About 4 billion years ago, a super-massive black hole in the heart of a distant galaxy erupted a stream of extremely energetic particles in the direction of Earth. Now, an international team of researchers, including also a researcher from University of Nova Gorica, has revealed how one of these particles, elusive neutrinos, was detected and, with the help of NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, linked back to its likely source.

Every year, the scientific magazine Physics World, one of the key journals in the field of physics, covering all the areas of physics, issues a list of “Top 10 breakthroughs in Physics”.

Hierarchic structure versus distance in a linear order

At its regular meeting on 14 November 2017, the Council of the Cherenkov Telescope Array Observatory (CTAO), responsible for construction and operation of the observatory for cosmic high-energy gamma-ray observation, adopted Slovenia as one of its shareholder countries.

The scientists of the LIGO and Virgo collaborations and around 70 observatories around the world, including Slovene researchers, published an important finding in the field of gravitational waves.