We present a detailed case study of the type II solar radio burst occurred on 06 March 2014 using combined data analysis. It is a classical radio event consisting of type III radio burst and a following type II radio burst in the dynamic spectrum. The type II radio burst is observed between 235 – 130 MHz (120 – 60 MHz) in harmonic (fundamental) bands with the life time of 5 minutes between 09:26 – 09:31 UT. The estimated speed of type II burst by applying two-fold Saito model is ∼ 650 km/s. An extreme ultraviolet (EUV) wave is observed with Atmospheric Imaging Assembly (AIA) onboard the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO). The very close temporal onset association of the EUV wave and flare energy release indicates that the EUV wave is likely produced by a flare pressure pulse. The eruption is also accompanied by a weak coronal mass ejection (CME) observed with the coronagraphs onboard the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) and the twin Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory (STEREO). The plane of sky speed of the CME was ∼ 252 km/s in the SOHO/LASCO-C2 and ∼ 280 km/s in the STEREO-B/SECCHI-COR1 images. The EUV wave has two wave fronts, one expanding radially outward and the other one moving along the flare loop arcade. The source position of the type II burst imaged by the Nançay Radio Heliograph (NRH) shows that it was associated with the outward moving EUV wave. The CME is independent of the shock wave as confirmed by the location of NRH radio sources below the CME’s leading edge. Therefore the type II radio burst is probably ignited by the flare. This study shows the possibility of EUV wave and coronal shock triggered by flare pressure pulse, generating the observed type II radio burst.

The Grubb refractor, currently located in the southwestern dome of the Cracow Observatory, is the oldest working instrument at the institute. It was manufactured in 1874 in Thomas Grubb's factory in Dublin. However, the history of this instrument at the Jagiellonian University begins much later, in 1929, when Prof. Tadeusz Banachiewicz brought this telescope to Cracow, where it became one of the main scientific instruments.
Now, celebrating the 150th anniversary of the Grubb refractor, we are entering a new era of this instrument's service to the astronomical community. Thanks to the new narrowband solar filters, it is becoming a valuable teaching tool for astronomy students. In this talk I’ll present a brief history of the Grubb refractor and show its current capabilities for solar observations.

Giant Radio Galaxies (GRGs) are home to active supermassive black holes that produce powerful bipolar radio jets, creating structures that extend over megaparsec scales. These are the largest structures in the Universe, growing up to Mpc-scales and even surpassing the size of massive galaxy clusters. Though discovered 50 years ago, significant progress in understanding GRGs has been made only in the past eight years, largely due to the advent of sensitive sky surveys and the efforts of the SAGAN project ('Search & Analysis of GRGs with Associated Nuclei').
Research continues to explore whether the immense size of GRGs is driven by their efficient AGN or the sparser environments in which they reside. The SAGAN project, initiated in 2016, has produced several research papers, including a review, discovering the largest samples of GRGs and refining our understanding of their key properties. The project has rejuvenated global interest in these giant radio sources.
This seminar will review how our understanding of GRGs has evolved with deep radio surveys like LoTSS, which have uncovered the largest and faintest GRGs. We will discuss optical-infrared data from SDSS and WISE, revealing AGN accretion properties, and millimetre-wave data from IRAM, offering insights into AGN fuelling. We will also showcase GMRT radio images revealing previously unseen low-surface-brightness structures in GRGs, enabling more precise age and magnetic field estimates. Lastly, we will demonstrate how GRGs can be used as cosmic probes of large-scale environments and magnetic fields, with key implications for understanding magnetogenesis.

The growing precision and accuracy of the Lemaitre-Hubble constant determination recently lead to inconsistency between the value of Lemaitre-Hubble constant derived by different methods. The CMB-based value is significantly lower than the value measured with the help of the standard candles. In this presentation, I show the specific solution to the second-order cosmological perturbation theory, which could partially explain the difference between the measured values of the Lemaitre-Hubble constant.

Magnetic fields, together with cosmic rays (CRs), play an important role in the dynamics and evolution of galaxies, but are difficult to estimate. Energy equipartition between magnetic fields and CRs provides a convenient way to approximate magnetic field strength from radio observations. In this talk I will present a new approach for calculating the equipartition magnetic field strength based on Bayesian methods. In this approach, the magnetic field is a random variable that is distributed according to a posterior distribution conditional on synchrotron emission and the size of the emitting region. It allows for the direct application of the general formulas for total and polarized synchrotron radiation without the need to invert these formulas, which has limited the equipartition method to highly simplified cases. We have derived the equipartition condition for the case of different low-energy breaks, slopes, and high-energy cutoffs of power-law spectra of the CR proton and electron distributions. The derived formalism was applied in the general case of a magnetic field consisting of both uniform and randomly oriented field components. The applied Bayesian approach naturally provides the uncertainties in the estimated magnetic field strengths resulting from the uncertainties in the observables and the assumed values of the unknown physical parameters. I will also present a web application BMAG that implements the described approach for different models and observational parameters.

Copernicus is associated with the study of objects on a cosmic scale. Only a few people know that the manuscript of De revolutionibus contains a fragment of 56 latin words, in which we find the term “atoms”. In it, Copernicus used the concept of the atom to formulate an additional argument for the extremely great distance to the fixed stars. I will try to answer different questions that arise. Why was this fragment not included in the Nuremberg first edition of 1543 and the subsequent latin editions? How did Copernicus understand the concept of the atom? How could he have known this hypothesis? How does his argument for the enormous distance to the stars look in the light of contemporary knowledge? Additionally, we will discuss Kepler's views on the discontinuous structure of matter, as presented in his 1611 work Strena seti de nive sexangula (Eng: On Hexagonal Snowflakes), and the little-known fact of Rheticus's stay in Kraków in the years 1554–1574.

Gamma-rays were not widely anticipated to be detected from novae. Yet, the 2010 detection of V407 Cygni nova by Fermi-LAT Collaboration was the evidence that gamma-ray emissions can occur from interactions between nova shells and the medium inside the binary. Subsequently, Fermi-LAT detected three different novae in High Energy Gamma-Rays (HEGR), and the search for Very High Energy Gamma-Ray (VHEGR) emission started -- with the first, and for now the only, VHEGR detection in August of 2021 from RS Ophiuchi recurrent nova, simultaneously and independently by MAGIC and H.E.S.S. collaborations, as well as LST-1 of the Cherenkov Telescope Array (CTA). In this talk, I will introduce the Cherenkov technique for photon detection, shortly report on 2010-2013 HEGR nova detections, describe current understanding of a nova outburst, and present my re-analysis of the H.E.S.S. data of the 2021 RS Ophiuchi nova, as well as explain the event reconstruction methods and compare my 2024 analysis to the original 2021 analysis.

Unfortunately, sometimes it happens, because:
1. space is a very hostile environment
2. in space, as a rule, we use things developed for the first time or as a result of small-series production
3. no tests on Earth are able to fully simulate the real space environment
4. however, even if we could deal with all the problems mentioned above, the main source of most disasters in space missions is still ourselves. A person with his faith in his own perfection, a tendency to downplay details, setting priorities that are not always adequate for a specific mission or simply insufficient knowledge, generates the main part of the problems himself.
These issues will be the subject of a presentation by Piotr Orleański. Several examples of major space missions (Chandrayaan-1, ROSETTA, BRITE, Herschel, Beagle2/MarsExpress, Sciaparelli/ExoMars) in which the above-mentioned elements were the cause of major in-orbit failures will be presented. The causes of failures will be discussed, and the possibilities of removing some of them will be shown.

The most spectacular jets are observed from active galactic nuclei, in particular from quasars. However, highly interesting jets are also launched by accretion flows in stellar binaries containing a normal star accreting onto a stellar-mass black hole. Such systems are analogs of quasars on a much smaller scale, and are called microquasars. There are two distinctly different types of jets in microquasars. Jets of the first type are steady, and are launched during accretion states characterized by hard X-ray emission. They are launched over weeks to months, but are observed only up to maximum distances of about a 1/1000 of a parsec. Those of the other type are launched on time scales of only a day during transitions of the accretion flow from the hard to soft spectral states, but are observed as moving blobs up to a parsec scale, i.e., up to ~1000 times larger distances. I will discuss possible causes of this difference, the jet emission mechanisms, collimation, the presence of electron-positron pairs, magnetic fields, bulk Lorentz factors and the jet power.