Hi! My name is Adam Ciesielski and I started my PhD at University of Amsterdam a few months ago, in October. This was also a real personal change in my life – it was the first time I really moved to the different city, and country even. I am not an English native speaker, so I have to apologize for any grammar mistakes, typos and misuse of words – but I am working on it! I do research on Tidal Disruption Events – the aim of my project is to do a spectro-temporal analysis of such events. My supervisors are Sera Markoff and Ralph Wijers (who is also my promotor).…

My colleague Adam Ciesielski and I recently returned from a 5-week work visit in (mostly) sunny Austin, Texas. Sera had been awarded the Beatrice Tinsley Centennial Visiting Professorship, permitting her to visit the University of Texas (UT) for a semester, and Adam, Chiara and I were excited to learn that we would be joining her at least for a short period. Among the many things we were able to do – embark on a road trip to Lubbock in icy conditions, visit Enchanted Rock and the German settlement of Fredericksburg, attend the infamous SXSW festival, visit a shooting range and a vineyard in the same weekend (!!!), traverse the hills and…

Hi! I gave recently a small internal talk about the general approach we are adopting to solve the MHD system of equations that describes the structure of a black hole’s jet. I am uploading the slides, so if there is anybody interested in the subject or just in knowing what we are studying with some more details, there you go! MHD-setup  

Just a quick note, Dr. Salomé Dibi successfully defended her thesis (and did a great job!) on 1 July, so that’s the third one out of the nest (who survived me…)! Congratulations!

I keep trying to get the traffic up from my group but it’s hard to remember to post although there is a lot going on (or because there is a lot going on). Anyway, we have some very nice news this week: 1) Salomé has accepted an offer for a postdoctoral position with Elmar Körding’s group at University of Nijmegen! Maybe she wants to say more but I’ll leave that to her. She had a busy start to the year doing conference talks and lecture tours, but it definitely paid off! 2) We just finished the 2014 PhD recruitment round for the API and we had an amazing amount of…

Hi all, my name is Riley Connors, and I arrived in Amsterdam in September to begin my PhD under the supervision of Sera. I’m at the stage now where I’ve encountered most of the teething problems you would associate with moving country, and I’m pretty well settled into life here, both in a work and social context. Amsterdam is a great place to live (surprise, surprise). The title of this post reflects a situation I think everyone finds themselves in at certain stages in their lives, whereby you finish something (in my case, my degree), and then begin something else, and you’re back to square one. You get a similar…

The few months “minisabbatical” in Paris was amazing, and very productive.   The downside was that I got pretty behind on updating this page, and I still have a lot of work to do there.   But in the meantime, I want to announce the new group hires, that resulted from two recent searches.   Firstly, Riley Connors from University of Leicester will be joining us as a PhD student starting in September.   He will be working on the Galactic supermassive black hole Sgr A* and considering its relationship to the broader class of black holes.   And starting in October, Dr. Chiara Ceccobello will join us from University…

We have just more or less finalized the program for our Lorentz Center meeting in January, which brings together the Working Group (WG) coordinators from our mega Sgr A* campaign to discuss the science output and strategy etc.   Here’s the link to the meeting: http://www.lorentzcenter.nl/lc/web/2013/561/info.php3?wsid=561&venue=Snellius and to our meeting poster, hot off the press!: http://www.snsa.nl/ftp/S1258-LCP-A-new-view-A-02.pdf

Our new paper is out in Nature this week (advanced online version), and the press releases are a’flying.   We found what’s called an “ultraluminous X-ray source” (ULX) in a nearby galaxy, Andromeda (M31), and for the very first time actually caught its radio emission from the jets evolving over time!  Until now there’s been a big debate about whether these ULXs are a long-sought-after class of black holes in an intermediate mass range between known stellar and supermassive black holes.   It’s an important point, because there are a lot of theories about how black holes are created and evolve, and there are all sorts of reasons why intermediate…