It is a significant moment for the FAIR-Project: A new partner comes aboard. The FAIR international laboratory welcomes the Czech Republic as new partner state. The Czech Republic joins FAIR as an “Aspirant Partner”, a new type of participation which the FAIR Council, the shareholders' meeting of FAIR GmbH, has created in 2017 to offer new countries interested in being part of FAIR a progressive path to membership.

Female students and young researchers from Mody University of Science and Technology (MUST) in Lakshmangarh, Rajasthan, India, may soon apply for a scholarship to enable them an internship, traineeship or research stay at GSI and FAIR in Darmstadt, Germany. The respective bi-lateral agreement between GSI and MUST - a university exclusively for women – was now signed by GSI and MUST representatives.

It is a new high-quality offer for international young scientists and at the same time a further important step for cosmic radiation research: The European Space Agency (ESA) and the international accelerator center FAIR (Facility for Antiproton and Ion Research), which is currently being built at GSI Helmholtzzentrum für Schwerionenforschung in Darmstadt, will establish a joint Summer School for Radiation Research.

Students and young researchers from SUT Thailand may soon profit from a new GET_INvolved programme, which will award scholarships to perform internships, traineeships and research experience at GSI and FAIR. Representatives of GSI and Suranaree University of Technology (SUT) in Thailand signed the respective bilateral agreement.

Since the groundbreaking in July 2017 a lot has been going on at the FAIR construction site. With a new filming technique a drone time lapse video has been produced that shows the progress.

South African students may now profit from the new GET_INvolved programme which will award scholarships to perform internships and research experience at GSI and FAIR. The respective tri-lateral agreement was now signed by GSI, FAIR and iThemba Laboratory for Accelerator Based Sciences (iThemba LABS, Cape Town) representatives.

This year, Dr. Moritz Pascal Reiter from the II. Physikalisches Institut of the Justus Liebig University in Gießen received the FAIR GENCO Award for young scientists. The award is sponsored by the FAIR-GSI Exotic Nuclei Community (GENCO) and endowed with 1,000 Euro. The bestowal by GENCO president Professor Christoph Scheidenberger and vice-president Professor Wolfram Korten took place in February in a special colloquium in the framework of the yearly GENCO meeting at FAIR and GSI.

Do some of the heaviest elements in our universe come from the collision of neutron stars? The answer may be gained from how the luminosity of such an event evolves over several weeks. A group of scientists from GSI and FAIR, TU Darmstadt, the National Academy of Sciences of Taiwan and Columbia University, USA, recently published the respective results in the journal Physical Review Letters.

The option to measure the gravitational waves of two merging neutron stars has offered the chance to answer some of the fundamental questions about the structure of matter. At the extremely high temperatures and densities in the merger scientists conjecture a phase-transition where neutrons dissolve into their constituents: quarks and gluons. In the current issue of Physical Review Letters, two international research groups report on their calculations of what the signature of such a phase…