(warning, very long post!!) I hope those of you reading our blog enjoy hearing all about the great research we are doing, led by amazing young researchers! This post is a bit different, but equally important, about the toll that academic life can have if we’re not careful about self-care. Overwork is something I still struggle with, and because it is such a common theme I thought I would post about something that happened to me this past week. As you can maybe glean from Tobi’s blog about our group retreat last month, I try to be open with my group about the trials and travails of academia, including my…
Read More >>Event Horizon Telescope Panel accepted for SXSW 2019!!
Awhile back I posted about our pitch to give a panel session at the SXSW Interactive Festival in 2019, in the “Intelligent Future” track. I am very pleased to announce that our panel was selected last week, and is now online as part of the official schedule!! We do not know what day yet, but I’m extremely excited about this opportunity. SXSW is a unique gathering of high-tech gurus and entertainment ‘influencers’ with artists, educators and musicians. We aim to get a very broad group of people interested in the truly amazing scientific capabilities we now have, like using the entire Earth as a single telescope to “photograph” a black…
Read More >>Celebrating international science with red meat
As this picture shows, nothing seems to make members of my group happier than a massive rack of ribs (well except for me and Atul, who are eating the veggie options…). That, and a visit from our collaborator Sasha Tchekhovskoy, from Northwestern University! (left to right: me, Koushik Chatterjee, Prof. Sasha Tchekhovskoy, Dr. Gibwa Musoke, Dr. Atul Chhotray, Matthew Liska) One of the things people often ask me is why I work here rather than the US, where I’m from. There are several answers to that, the main one being that University of Amsterdam is one of the best places in the world for both of the things I do…
Read More >>Event Horizon Telescope SXSW 2019 Panel Pitch
We are busy analyzing the data from the first full run of the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) in 2017, which I’ve posted about before but is a telescope effectively the size of the Earth, aimed at making the first ever actual picture of a supermassive black hole! While everything is understandably still under embargo it’s fair to say that we are very excited about the new results, which we anticipate announcing at the end of this year, or early in 2019. As part of that, we have been seeking new venues to reach the public, beyond standard scientific meetings, and so this year we decided to submit a pitch for…
Read More >>Predicting what black holes look like
The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), a ‘virtual’ Earth-sized telescope made by linking facilities across the globe, is on the cusp of announcing its first ever results to “photograph” a black hole! Why does this relate to our research group? Well, we develop theoretical models for the physics of what happens to stuff as it falls into a black hole (and in some cases also escapes the pull and gets ejected in big streams of hot plasma). To know if a model is correct we need to be able to compare it to real data; i.e we use our model to make predictions for the light created just outside the black…
Read More >>Not your Niels Bohr physics conference
Coming off the rush from an extremely unique conference that Enrico Ramirez Ruiz, Jane Dai and Nicole Cabrera Salazar and I just organized, at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen. This was a theoretical astrophysics conference, but also the first ever workshop designed to organize the URM community in a very non-URM dominated field. We had a very emotional week discussing many of the challenges we have, and continue to face, just to be able to do the thing we love: science. But it was also extremely hopeful and I feel like it was the start of a very positive movement to make our field more accepting of a wider…
Read More >>New paper made HEA picture of the week!
Our new Nature Astronomy paper PR image made the High-Energy Astrophysics Picture of the week at NASA!! Click on the image to go the POW on the NASA site, where you can also link to the press release with more information about the article.
Read More >>Starting to revive the site
Yeah, so it’s been awhile. But the semester is starting, there are new people in the group, and with the help of Vanna Pugliese, we’re going to start updating and revamping the site to make it more active. To kick it off, here’s a funny handheld panorama taken in Porquerolles, an island off the coast of France I never knew existed before this meeting, where some of us were at the first conference dedicated to Microquasars since 2009! It was a great conference, the army barracks rooms, not so much. Here we are going through Tom’s and Chiara’s talks one last time, and looking a bit distorted from the panoramic…
Read More >>Mill for Science
Today was Earth Day but also the day of many Marches for Science across the planet. We did our part here in Amsterdam (see also marchforscience.nl): a group of us from the astronomy department here at University of Amsterdam set up a booth and hung out all day answering questions, showing the solar telescopes we couldn’t use because it was too cloudy (typical…) and various movies and visuals about astrophysics on a monitor to lure people in. But unlike many other events, there was no real march, it was all located on the Museumplein in Amsterdam, with a bunch of people milling around between tents and stages, so that’s why…
Read More >>Aftermath
Sorry for the delay in posting, I was knocked out for a few days with something but catching up now. So EHT did end up triggering the final night on 11 April! Things went really well, and one of the things I really wanted to see happen, happened! My main role in all this was to help organize and coordinate the “multiwavelength” observations, meaning trying to get telescopes in space and on the ground looking in other wavelengths (primarily X-ray and infared (IR) which are the only other bands besides radio that are visible through all the muck between us and the center of the Galaxy). We had a big…
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