Group Blog

As you are reading this text you are most likely using a device that contains a collection of central processing units (CPUs) running processes and threads, and potentially even uses a graphics processing unit (GPU) to render it nicely for you. Besides all of us using these “things” every day in computers, tablets, and smartphones, […]

The very first conference talk I ever gave as a young, impressionable PhD student was done remotely. It was 2021, and as COVID loomed large in everyone’s minds meetings retreated to the relative safety of the internet. While that first talk was a bit unconventional due to the circumstances, for me the main challenge was

Black holes and their emissions  Black holes are one of the most fascinating objects in our universe – from their formation in extreme, cataclysmic events to their interactions with the surrounding environment they contain an unending well of mysteries waiting to be solved. We know them as objects of extreme masses from which no information

In my earlier blog post (part 1), I posed the question of how some of the most energetic gamma-rays observed by the LHAASO and HAWC observatories can be created. In order to understand their origin, I drew an intuitive picture of how a photon can scatter off an electron at rest, usually called Compton scattering.

Neurodivergence is understood as a variation in human brain functioning that influences sociability, learning, sensory processing, movement and/or attention, among others (Kapp, 2020). The term encompasses a broader set of distinct conditions such as autism, ADHD or dyslexia. We understand neurodivergence as a spectrum, since it covers a wide range of conditions with varying levels

Did you know that light can bounce off a charged particle like an electron? And that this interaction can lead to some of the highest-energy gamma-ray radiation that we have ever observed in the universe? In this double blog post, I will build up an intuitive and visual understanding of how this quantum billiards between

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

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

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

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