Group Blog

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 […]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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,

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