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 […]
Science Enables Globetrotting! Read More »
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
From Life to Death Read More »
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.
Our black hole, Sagittarius A* Read More »
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
Beyond the Milky Way Band Read More »
…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
When the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie… Read More »
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,
When reading our blog posts, you might find yourself asking what the scale of the black holes, jets, or accretion disks we speak of are. If that is the case, then this post is for you! Given that Halloween just happened, let us choose our base unit as one Jack-o’-lantern pumpkin (JOLP) that is 20
Scales, scales, scales?! (Part I) Read More »
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
You know you are a theorist when… Read More »
