noun: imposter syndrome Unfortunately, the feeling of being a fraud merely skating by on luck is all too common in STEM fields. Women, under-represented minorities, and those early in their careers are particularly susceptible and therefore make up a disproportionate number of “imposter syndrome” sufferers.  As a community, there’s a lot of discourse about imposter syndrome and overcoming it on an individual level. But many of the suggested courses of action to combat these internalized feelings of fraud, such as “celebrate your successes” or “let go of perfectionism”, can read as empty platitudes that are typically much easier said than done. Crucially, these suggestions, although well-intentioned, focus more on what…

This month, I decided to write a blog post targeted at people outside of astronomy, to explain the reasoning behind one of the tools that we use. This is because I think the means and methods we have for exploring astrophysical phenomena are often as cool as the actual sources that we study, but often we don’t talk about how we go about discovering something. So, in this line, I’m starting simply, explaining the reasoning behind why we use a particular units system. Now, the title might be the first you’re hearing about this. And you might ask why we would ever, ever choose to measure the largest known things in the…

Using observations from 2017 and 2018, the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) Collaboration has deepened our understanding of the supermassive black hole at the center of Messier 87 (M87*). If you read English or Dutch, I highly recommend checking out the official press release: M87* One Year Later: Catching the Black Hole’s Turbulent Accretion Flow, of het nieuws in de Nederlandse Onderzoekschool voor Astronomie (NOVA): Gas bij zwart gat M87 spiraliseert tegen draairichting in. I am proud to be quoted in the official press release, acknowledging the time and effort I devoted to that project. I performed statistical analyses to compare general relativistic magnetohydrodynamic (GRMHD) simulations with observations of M87*. My…

Some time ago, I was sitting at a family gathering when my grandmother asked me: “What is a black hole?”. I was in my second year of the astronomy bachelor’s in Chile, the first-ever image of the M87 black hole had just been made public by the Event Horizon Telescope and it was all over international news. I noticed that other people around me stopped their conversations and started listening to my response: “Well, you know how the Earth has gravity we can’t escape? That’s how we stay on the earth instead of flying into space. A black hole has such strong gravity that light cannot escape. Therefore, it’s a…

With the advent of the Christmas time, it is common to put yourself a nice candle in the living room (or sometimes even four or more). It is particularly nice to enjoy the warm and dim orange light, softly flickering and creating a cozy atmosphere. As an astrophysicist researching the light emission from outflows moving at almost the speed of light towards us, I was wondering what would happen to such a Christmas candle if I would do the same thing to the candle – move it at the speed of light. Clearly, the airstream would blow out the candle and it wouldn’t burn if we put it into a…

Astrophysicist by day, a music and pop-culture enthusiast by night, our very own Sera Markoff is elected as a member of the Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen (the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences). This prestigious recognition underscores her contributions to the advancement of astrophysics and her role as a leading figure in both science and science outreach.  The Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, known as the KNAW (Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen), is one of the oldest and most prestigious scientific organizations in the Netherlands. It serves as a key advisory body to the Dutch government on scientific matters, and its members are selected based on…

A year into my research and I’m slowly uncovering a lot about the zoo that populates objects under the title “Active Galactic Nuclei” (AGN). The fact that they are multi-wavelength emitters means that we get a variety of features to try and understand across different energy bands, but that also means that categories and sub-categories have become increasingly complex to describe them. The most straightforward standard model includes the central black hole, an accretion disk, a jet, an obscuring torus, and ionized clouds of gas near the black hole (broad/narrow line region; AGN model shown in Figure 1). Around the 1990s, a unification scheme for the numerous features of AGN…

It has been a while since I wrote my last post and much has happened in the meantime. As I explained in an earlier post, I’m a master’s student and within the master’s program for Physics & Astronomy there are seven tracks. I am in the Gravitation, Astro- and Particle Physics (GRAPPA) track which focuses on the intersection of theoretical physics, experimental (astro)particle physics and astrophysics. Now, the cool thing is that one MSc student from the GRAPPA track is awarded a grant to enhance their master’s thesis each year. This grant is called the Volkert van der Willigen grant after its initiator and it is meant to support young…

The introduction of density and internal energy floors is seemingly unphysical, but at the same time, a necessary feature of General-Relativistic Magnetohydrodynamic simulations. The open magnetic field lines in the polar regions of our code that thread the black hole Event Horizon become devoid of any matter/energy due to the outflow boundaries at the inner (horizon) and outer grid radii, causing the plasma to either be expelled, or eaten up by the black hole. Given the vacuum-phobic nature of the GRMHD equations, one has to artificially inject some energy and density if the local values of the same in a cell (in the drift frame of the jet, ensures conserved…