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…

The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), a ‘virtual’ Earth-sized telescope made by linking facilities across the globe, is on the cusp of announcing its first ever results to “photograph” a black hole! Why does this relate to our research group? Well, we develop theoretical models for the physics of what happens to stuff as it falls into a black hole (and in some cases also escapes the pull and gets ejected in big streams of hot plasma). To know if a model is correct we need to be able to compare it to real data; i.e we use our model to make predictions for the light created just outside the black…

Hello readers! I am Atul Chhotray, a post-doctoral researcher in Sera’s group. I am a theoretical / numerical astrophysicist, which means I employ the laws of physics / computers to understand and explain the workings of the universe. I have been fascinated by black holes since time immemorial – and in this post I will talk about them a bit, and jets. A Very Brief Introduction to Black Holes Black holes are regions of space where the gravity is so strong that not even light (which travels at the fastest possible speed in the universe) can escape it. For an Earthly example, imagine that you want to go into space.…

Hi, my name is Gibwa Musoke. I recently joined Sera’s group as a postdoc. I conduct supercomputer simulations of the powerful fast-moving outflows, called jets, associated with active galactic nuclei (AGN). AGN are highly energetic and very bright compact regions at the centres of some galaxies, and are powered by black holes `feeding’ at the galactic centres as shown in Figure 1. Research Interests I am primarily interested in investigating how the jets interact with their environments at large distances from the centres of their host galaxies, and additionally, how the conditions in their environments influence the evolution of the jets. I conduct high resolution hydrodynamic simulations using the FLASH…

Hi, I am Tom Russell, a Veni Research Fellow working with Sera’s group. My work mainly focuses on radio observations of accreting compact objects (mostly black hole and neutron star X-ray binaries, but even the occasional white dwarf) to see how the outflowing jet evolves over time. I then link the jet evolution to other processes that are occurring in the system to try to understand how jets are powered. At the moment we don’t really understand how these jets are launched, collimated, or even what they are composed of. It is important try to understand as much about this, because these systems output a huge amount of energy into…

Hi there! I’m Koushik, a 2nd year PhD student in Sera’s group. I did my undergrad in India, a really beautiful country and also known to lay quite a lot of emphasis on highly theoretical research work (might even be a tad too much!). While I did my masters in Physics and my thesis on Einstein’s theory of general relativity (GR in short), my interests lie with applications to astrophysical phenomena, e.g. black holes. The most extreme sources of gravity are black holes lying deep in the heart of galaxies, millions to billions of times the mass of the Sun, such as Sagittarius A* in the Milky Way (our own…

My name is Tobias Beuchert. I recently joined this group as a postdoc. My research interests are to expand our knowledge about accreting compact objects (black holes or neutron stars), their energy consumption and energy release. Disclaimer: this blogpost may contain one or two elements of slightly exaggerated content. This is an attempt to make the astonishing nature beyond our habitable horizon a little bit more accessible.  Imagine a vacuum cleaner that does not simply suck in matter, but feeds from an orbiting disk of dirt in your living room just like water forming a funnel before disappearing in the sink. Now, remove the bag inside the vacuum cleaner and…