Given that our group has been growing significantly over the last years, annual group retreats are the ideal occasion to get to know each other better and talk about important topics that don’t necessarily find their way in usual working days. So, just recently, we spent a whole day at a beautiful little farm in the outskirts of Amsterdam called “Bomen op Locatie”. Surprisingly, the weather turned out to be amazing, even close to the end of the year, even in the Netherlands. While the whole village was still asleep, our arrival at the farm was immediately recognized by one of two little pigs that live a happy life on…

Supermassive black holes are powerful engines. A black hole with the mass of a million-10 billion times the mass of the Sun is fueled by gas surrounding it. A small fraction of these systems accelerate particles in a collimated outflow of plasma, called jet. Many questions about AGN jets remain unanswered: How are those jets launched? Which particles are accelerated in a jet? We know that electrons (and positrons) are in a jet, as we see linearly polarized synchrotron emission from these jets in the radio-X-ray wavelengths. Electrons in the magnetic field of the jet gyrate and produce the light we see. However, it is not clear whether protons are…

The first paper of my PhD thesis was accepted on Friday for publication on Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, and it was posted on arXiv yesterday! If you’re interested in jets and how to be clever with data to learn more about them, check it out! https://arxiv.org/abs/1810.11341

For this blog I thought I would talk a bit about my favourite telescope (yes, I have one of those…). As Dimitris talked about last week, detecting high-energy radiation can be complicated. X-rays for example are blocked by the atmosphere, so if you want to look at astronomical sources emitting X-rays you need to put a satellite in orbit. Beyond that, building the proper optics for detecting X-rays in the first place is very complicated. What makes observing X-rays so much trickier than, for example, the visible light that our eye is sensitive to, is how much energy each X-ray carries. Being so energetic means that if you were to…

or How to detect high energy γ rays   Radiation is being produced all over the universe. This radiation can either be observed by detectors on the surface of the Earth or be absorbed by the atmosphere. As Figure 1 demonstrates, radiation at radio wavelengths and visible light can reach the terrestrial observatories located around the globe. However, infrared, X rays and γ rays cannot travel through the atmosphere and space satellites are required in order to detect them. Since the onset of space missions in the 60s and 70s, satellites have surveyed the whole sky from infrared energies up to GeV γ rays (1GeV = 10^9 eV). However, in…

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…

In this blog-post, I want to share my experience in the field of science communication and give you my personal perspective of things. I would be very happy to receive your feedback. Maybe, you disagree with what I say? Maybe, I missed something in my discussion? Feel free to contact me (t.beuchert@uva.nl) or post a comment below. Who we should communicate with and why “Science communication” is a term that one can write a lot about. I think what is important is that we would like to bridge between the broad public and the scientific community as well as within the scientific community itself. That way, we can establish links…

As this picture shows, nothing seems to make members of my group happier than a massive rack of ribs (well except for me and Atul, who are eating the veggie options…). That, and a visit from our collaborator Sasha Tchekhovskoy, from Northwestern University! (left to right: me, Koushik Chatterjee, Prof. Sasha Tchekhovskoy, Dr. Gibwa Musoke, Dr. Atul Chhotray, Matthew Liska) One of the things people often ask me is why I work here rather than the US, where I’m from. There are several answers to that, the main one being that University of Amsterdam is one of the best places in the world for both of the things I do…

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…

Gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) have an interesting and colourful history. These extreme events were first discovered, serendipitously, in the 1960s by the U.S. Vela satellites. These satellites were originally designed to make sure that the Soviet Union does not perform any nuclear tests in space, which would be a violation of the 1963 Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. When a nuclear explosion takes place it emits flashes of gamma-ray radiation. These satellites had gamma-ray detectors on-board to detect these gamma-ray flashes in case of a nuclear detonation in space. Although the Vela satellites never detected any atomic bombs exploding in space, they observed a new, exciting, phenomenon; Gamma-ray bursts. Initially scientists speculated…