The National Science Centre invites research institutions to declare commitment as potential Host Institutions to Dioscuri Centres of Scientific Excellence. Applications for the establishment of Dioscuri Centres may come from basic organisational units and research centres of higher education institutions, research units of the Polish Academy of Sciences, research institutes, international research institutes established on the territory of Poland, Polish Academy of Learning, other research institutions established on the territory of Poland. The deadline for submissions expires on 2^nd October 2017.

Ten Dioscuri Centres of Scientific Excellence will be established at Polish research institutions as a result of signing a framework agreement between the National Science Centre (NCN) and the Max Planck Society (MPG). The official signing will take place on 4^th July at the Wawel Castle in Krakow. »

Thanks to regular brightness measurements of over a billion stars of our Galaxy, astronomers working at The Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment (OGLE) at Warsaw University Astronomical Observatory, Poland, have discovered an unknown class of pulsating variable stars. Follow-up observations have shown that these objects are much hotter than our Sun. A very unusual property of the objects is that they significantly change their physical parameters over a period of about half an hour. Such rapid variations have never been observed in any known type of pulsating stars. Theoretical models confirm the observed behaviour, but the origin of the new stars remains a mystery. The discovery of the new class of variable stars has been published in the prestigious Nature Astronomy journal. »