I’m Matteo Lucchini and have been working as a PhD student in Sera’s group for almost two years now. Like everyone else in the group I focus on figuring out what black holes do, but for this blog post I thought I would write something a little different (and ever so slightly romanticized). Very often, scientists are asked “what is your research for? Does it have any practical use?” It’s really a perfectly legitimate question, and one that I think doesn’t quite address what the point of science is. In some fields, say medical research, it’s very easy to answer (“my research will help in fighting a horrible disease!”) but…

You must have noticed the spectacular image shown above. The purple haze shows the radio emission of relativistic jets belonging to the nearby galaxy Centaurus A. Here the object is projected in its actual size as it would be seen on the sky if its light were visible to the human eye. This stunning example spans 1,000,000 (!!!) light years across the sky, and many more jets such as these can be found. (If you’re wondering about that shining globe on the left, that’s the full Moon for scale) But what creates those jets exactly? At the center of this huge system in Centaurus A (at the small dot in…

I’m Dr. Felicia Krauss and I have been working in Amsterdam for two years. I focus on multimessenger and multiwavelength aspects of black hole systems; Galactic black holes (~10 times the mass of our Sun) and supermassive black holes (One million to 1 billion times the mass of the Sun; this equals the total mass of a small galaxy within a tiny region at the center of these systems). Supermassive black hole systems are often called active galactic nuclei (AGN), because they are very bright and located at the center of their galaxy. Both types of system are very similar. The black hole is a central engine that uses fuel…

Yeah, so it’s been awhile. But the semester is starting, there are new people in the group, and with the help of Vanna Pugliese, we’re going to start updating and revamping the site to make it more active. To kick it off, here’s a funny handheld panorama taken in Porquerolles, an island off the coast of France I never knew existed before this meeting, where some of us were at the first conference dedicated to Microquasars since 2009! It was a great conference, the army barracks rooms, not so much. Here we are going through Tom’s and Chiara’s talks one last time, and looking a bit distorted from the panoramic…

Today was Earth Day but also the day of many Marches for Science across the planet. We did our part here in Amsterdam (see also marchforscience.nl): a group of us from the astronomy department here at University of Amsterdam set up a booth and hung out all day answering questions, showing the solar telescopes we couldn’t use because it was too cloudy (typical…) and various movies and visuals about astrophysics on a monitor to lure people in. But unlike many other events, there was no real march, it was all located on the Museumplein in Amsterdam, with a bunch of people milling around between tents and stages, so that’s why…

The Event Horizon Telescope (see here for a nice article about the project) just triggered it’s first 2017 observation, the first ever with phased ALMA at its core, as well as several other facilities across the globe of the Earth!! Tonight we’ll be observing the tiniest scales ever seen before in “Track D”, which means the supermassive black holes and jets of systems: 3C279, M87, and OJ 287 (which may even have two black holes)!! We also have a ton of great multiwavelength coverage. I’m super excited, wish us luck that the weather holds, and we get good data!!