Ok, so I’m still dreadfully behind on updating this page, but I wanted to mention our new paper that came out last week (30 August) in Science: Wang, Nowak, Markoff et al., “Dissecting X-ray–Emitting Gas Around the Center of Our Galaxy”. Here’s the link if you have access otherwise it’s on astroph. The paper is very exciting, from our massive 3Msec campaign with the Chandra X-ray Observatory on the super massive black hole in the center of our Galaxy, Sgr A*. That’s a whopping 35 days of observations on an instrument where in the past we normally would get a few days a year. So in one year we doubled…

I’m really excited, it looks like I got funding to hire a new PhD student for next year, to work on all the great new Sgr A* data we have coming in, among other things!!   We are experimenting with a different hiring system this year, advertising all our positions together and then doing a pooled interview day in February.   Amsterdam is a great place to get a PhD so if you know any good candidates, or you’re interested, please apply by 20 Dec following the instructions at this link (please click on this link, the applications do not go through me but rather via a central hiring procedure!!)!   Here’s…

A researcher from BBC Horizon called me the other day to talk about black holes and jets!   They are thinking about doing a new show on this topic, in part because of the so-called G2 cloud that seems to be on a collision course with our Galaxy’s central supermassive black hole, Sgr A*  (see http://www.mpe.mpg.de/resources/pgn/g2/index.php).   We talked for over an hour, it was really fun having the chance to explain everything from basic accretion around black holes to Sgr A* in particular.   I hope they do something cool with the show, it’s an exciting time and a good opportunity to promote the kind of science we do!

I (and members of my group) spend a lot of time thinking about the supermassive black hole in the center of our Galaxy, Sgr A* (see recent group blog post, for instance).   The new hard X-ray imaging mission NuSTAR has just released a really cool series of images showing a hard X-ray flare from Sgr A*!    We have also been monitoring Sgr A* as part of our Chandra X-ray Visionary Program and even caught another flare recently at the same time as them! http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/nustar/multimedia/pia16214.html

Just found out this week that the Lorentz Center proposal I submitted for a small workshop to bring the Sgr A* XVP collaboration (see post) together in January was accepted!   So that’s good news. I have to admit to being a bit “proposal’d out”, had four deadlines in four weeks basically, the one I just mentioned, plus along with Jacco Vink and others we submitted two proposals for funding for Dutch contributions for the next generation TeV (very high energy gamma-ray) facility, CTA.   Then yesterday was a proposal to the Dutch national science foundation NWO, for a project to develop new jet models for black holes that are linked more self-consistently…

I am Co-PI of the longest ever campaign on the supermassive black hole in the center of our Galaxy, Sgr A*!  This program, called an “X-ray Visionary Project” for its legacy value, will probe the mechanisms driving high-energy processes around our nearest, and very weak, active galactic nucleus! The campaign is ongoing, so far in just 10% of the observations we have already seen the brightest X-ray flare yet, providing exciting new clues about the plasma and particle acceleration conditions within 10 Schwarzschild radii of the black hole!