In these last few years many fields in astrophysics have been advancing at an amazing rate. One of the fastest has been the study of the so-called “fast radio bursts” (or FRBs). As the name implies, FRBs are flashes of radio emission that happen extremely fast – down to a few milliseconds. This short duration makes them very challenging to detect, so the first FRB was only detected in 2007 at a facility called the Parkes Observatory. To complicate the picture, earlier on the Parkes Observatory detected another type of never seen before transient, called “perytons”. Early on it became clear that while it was possible for FRBs to be…

This is going to be a hard post for me to write, and for everyone to read. It will not discuss science, because today I want to talk about something that I think is far more important.TW: sexual assault discussion below. My main hobby is PC gaming, and many of my favorite games (Starcraft 1 and 2, Dota 2, World of Warcraft) in the past few years have turned into full blown electronic sports (or e-sports) – they are now played competitively by full time e-athletes, and the competition is as fierce, enthralling and exciting as any sport. In the past week or so, more and more people (mostly involving…

Today I will be previewing a neat result me and Tom have been working on for the past few months. It’s going to be a bit more technical than my usual post, so please bear with me. In September 2017, a new black hole X-ray binary called Maxi J1535-571 was discovered, and Tom started observing it with ATCA, an Australian radio telescope. At the same time, many of our collaborators also looked at the source with infrared, optical and X-ray observatories, producing lots of really interesting data to analyze. This is really useful because while X-ray and optical data gives us some information about the material falling towards the black…

Today’s story starts in 1967, at the height of the Cold War. The US Air Force has been using its Vela satellites to monitor any traces of gamma-ray radiation, a dead giveaway of nuclear tests being conducted on Earth. The goal is to make sure that the USSR is complying with the 1963 Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. On July 2nd, 1967, the Vela 3 and 4 satellites detect a gamma-ray flash that doesn’t look like anything observed before. Over time, they start seeing more and more of these events; according to myth, this was a terrifying find which was immediately classified. Nobody knew that such signals can originate from space,…

Today I’ll be writing about the very first topic I ever did research in, during my Bachelor’s thesis: Tidal Disruption Events (or TDEs), or the most dramatic way in which a star’s life can end. Before getting into cool astrophysics stuff, let me remind you of how tides (roughly) work. Because of gravitation, the Moon attracts the Earth; however, because gravitation depends on the distance between two objects, points on the Earth that are closer to the Moon are attracted more, and vice versa. If the thing that’s being attracted isn’t solid – say, an Ocean – the result is that the Ocean gets deformed by gravity: In practice it’s…

In this post I thought I’d write a bit about my Master’s thesis, which eventually (thanks to a good bit of luck, as you will see) led to my very first paper. During my master’s thesis I worked (together with Fabrizio Tavecchio and Gabriele Ghisellini at the Merate Observatory, near Milan) on understanding the properties of AGN jets on large scales – and by large, I mean hundreds of kiloparsecs or more, way beyond the edge of the galaxy hosting the central black hole. Historically, these sources have been observed in the radio frequency, and to this day they are generally referred to as “radio-loud AGN” – even though scientifically,…

The first paper of my PhD thesis was accepted on Friday for publication on Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, and it was posted on arXiv yesterday! If you’re interested in jets and how to be clever with data to learn more about them, check it out! https://arxiv.org/abs/1810.11341

For this blog I thought I would talk a bit about my favourite telescope (yes, I have one of those…). As Dimitris talked about last week, detecting high-energy radiation can be complicated. X-rays for example are blocked by the atmosphere, so if you want to look at astronomical sources emitting X-rays you need to put a satellite in orbit. Beyond that, building the proper optics for detecting X-rays in the first place is very complicated. What makes observing X-rays so much trickier than, for example, the visible light that our eye is sensitive to, is how much energy each X-ray carries. Being so energetic means that if you were to…

I’m Matteo Lucchini and have been working as a PhD student in Sera’s group for almost two years now. Like everyone else in the group I focus on figuring out what black holes do, but for this blog post I thought I would write something a little different (and ever so slightly romanticized). Very often, scientists are asked “what is your research for? Does it have any practical use?” It’s really a perfectly legitimate question, and one that I think doesn’t quite address what the point of science is. In some fields, say medical research, it’s very easy to answer (“my research will help in fighting a horrible disease!”) but…