Something slightly different today. Recently I posted about some work I was involved with where we discovered a candidate X-ray binary in the galaxy M83. However, that work came out of a much larger project completely unrelated to X-ray binaries. For the past few years, I have been working with a number of collaborators all over the world (Rick White, Knox Long, Bill Blair, Roberto Soria, and Frank Winkler) to observe, map, and create a deep new radio catalogue of the face-on spiral galaxy M83. This work has just been accepted for publication in MNRAS, so expect to see it in full very soon. Using radio observations with the Australia…

Hi all, Over January and February, we had an exchange student, Wanga Mulaudzi from the University of Cape Town, come to Amsterdam to work with us on a new project. This project uses multiwavelength data from an outbursting black hole X-ray binary to model how the jet physics evolved during the outburst. With Wanga, we collated radio, mm, infrared and optical observations to trace the jet evolution, as well as X-ray observations to determine how the accretion flow was changing and driving the jet evolution. Due to the multiwavelength and multi-disciplinary nature of this project, this project included many of us in Sera’s group: myself, Matteo, Sera, Fe, Tobi, and…

Hi all, Firstly, I hope you all had a great holiday period! Over the Christmas break, I had a paper published in ApJ letters (links at the bottom of the page) that I thought I might summarise here. This paper was focused on the radio emission from a newly discovered X-ray transient called IGR J17591-2342. In this post, I want go through events in chronological order, which should show our thinking and highlight the reason for our paper. However, before I get too carried away, I first need to introduce something called the radio/X-ray correlation for accreting stellar-mass compact objects. There is a well-studied non-linear relationship between the radio and…

This week we have had an exciting new result published in Nature. This was work led by Jakob van den Eijnden, a PhD student here at in Amsterdam, and included his advisor Nathalie Degenaar, myself, Rudy Wijnands and Juan Hernandez-Santisteban here in Amsterdam, as well as James Miller-Jones (ICRAR/Curtin University, Australia) and Greg Sivakoff (University of Alberta, Canada). And I thought this would be a perfect opportunity for a blog. Fig 1: Jets are observed from all types of accreting sources. Jets are observed from accreting objects throughout the universe. We see them from accreting black holes, white dwarfs, neutron stars, and even young stars (Fig 1). About the only place we…

Hi again, I thought now might be a good time to highlight some of the other work that we get to do (using one of my programs as an example, but almost all of us here at API do something similar, or even better). Work that isn’t sitting at a computer analysing data or writing papers on the amazing topics we study, but is instead us doing our best to give back to the community in a fun and exciting way in the form of community outreach. As a scientist, one of the greatest things we get to do is scientific outreach into the local community. We are particularly lucky…

Hi, I am Tom Russell, a Veni Research Fellow working with Sera’s group. My work mainly focuses on radio observations of accreting compact objects (mostly black hole and neutron star X-ray binaries, but even the occasional white dwarf) to see how the outflowing jet evolves over time. I then link the jet evolution to other processes that are occurring in the system to try to understand how jets are powered. At the moment we don’t really understand how these jets are launched, collimated, or even what they are composed of. It is important try to understand as much about this, because these systems output a huge amount of energy into…