The last three weeks have been exciting for three members of the Jetset group, namely Prof. Sera Markoff and her two students, León Sosapanta Salas and Wanga Mulaudzi. The three first travelled to Hong Kong to attend the ‘Astrophysical Black Holes: A Rapidly Moving Field‘, which was a meeting in honour of the 2020 Shaw Prize recipient, Prof. Roger Blandford. Prof. Roger Blandford is known for his theory, the Blandford-Znajek process, which states that relativistic jets extract their energies from rotating black holes. The meeting brought together experts from all over the world to share their findings on astrophysical black holes. León and Wanga also presented their PhD works during…

Ever wonder about the lifetime of a star or how black holes form as stellar remnants? When clouds of gas and dust cool and collapse under gravitational forces, they form protostars. Protostars can be seen as the infancy stage of stars because they are still gathering mass from the parent molecular cloud. The masses of these protostars drastically affect the evolution of the star over the course of time. The more massive the star is, the more violent its death is. The less massive, the more likely the star is to become a dwarf (see Figure above). Dwarfs are generally systems with low energetic processes. The three subclasses of dwarfs…

Tune in today (21 June 2022) at 8pm CET as host, Melanie During interviews our PhD student, Wanga Mulaudzi. In this interview, Wanga will tell us about our black hole, Sagittarius A*, and how the Event Horizon Telescope collaboration went about imaging it for the very first time in history! Watch the livestream here https://youtu.be/jWsC8HJ5d4k.

For translations of this post in Xhosa, Xitsonga, Afrikaans and Arabic, see here! If you have ever been lucky enough to be in a remote area, far away from the buzz of city life, then you might have looked up at the sky as the wonders of the Milky Way were revealed to you. Seeing the Milky Way with your own eyes is a truly magical experience. But what is the Milky Way and why does it look like a starry band of milk. Well, the Milky Way is the galaxy we live in. From our point of view, which is from Earth, when we look towards the centre of…

…that’s amore! The moon is one of the most beautiful objects in the sky to photograph. Not only is it close enough for us to resolve its craters, its apparent size is also large enough for its light to be distorted by the Earth’s atmosphere. This distortion is what causes the moon to appear to be different colours. It is important to note, however, that the moon does not produce its own light. The moon’s surface reflects light from the sun! If we were to take a photo of the moon outside of the Earth’s atmosphere, it would always appear to be a shade of grey. When viewed from inside…

This past month, we bid farewell to Doosoo Yoon who has been a postdoctoral fellow in our group since September 2018. His work focused on using the GRMHD code H-AMR to study the dynamics of accretion disks, winds, and jets around black holes. He is also a member of the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) project, where his main focus is to study supermassive black holes such as Sgr A* and M87. For Doosoo’s farewell dinner, we went to The Madras Diaries in Leidseplein to have some authentic South Indian dishes. A big hit for the group were the dosas, which are a crispy savoury crepe made from lentils and rice.…

You know you are a theorist when you find yourself solving problems that were “left as an exercise for the reader”. You might even know you are a theorist when your default hypothesis for a weird astrophysical phenomenon isn’t just “because of magnetism”. I have not been able to relate to these statements until this year — better late than never! Originally a student whose work was based on observational astronomy, I was introduced to theoretical astrophysics in 2019 when I visited the Jetset group to work on a winter project. I worked with Dr Thomas Russell and Prof. Sera Markoff in collaboration with other members of the group to…