The 6th China-Chile Bilateral Conference for Astronomy was held in Puerto Varas, Chile on Nov. 6-10, 2023. Over 80 experts, young scholars, and students from more than 30 astronomy research institutions, including the Chinese Academy of Sciences, various Chinese universities, and Chilean astronomy institutions, participated in the conference. They engaged in in-depth discussions on research achievements, the latest developments in China-Chile cooperation, and future collaboration opportunities.

A recent study led by researchers from NAOC has discovered a young massive protostar at its very beginning of escaping away from its parental dense-gas cloud. It provides a first clear observational example that the cloud dynamical activities can drive the newly formed star to move away from the parental cloud. This process would considerably account for the “escaping stars” over the Galactic space.

The mystery of the first galaxies of the universe is an indomitable urge of human beings. The formation of them is mastered by the nature of dark matter which is also one of the most important problems faced by fundamental physics. The 21-cm absorption lines from neutral hydrogen against radio-bright sources at cosmic dawn, known collectively as the 21-cm forest, have been recently proposed to simultaneously probe dark matter and the first galaxies. This novel probe was explored by a joint research team from the Northeastern University and the NAOC. This work was published in Nature Astronomy on July 6, 2023.