Index
A group of students from the Faculty of Science will be launching a rocket into space to collect data next week in the far north of Sweden. With the experiment, the Nijmegen students aim to investigate how they can better track the rocket during its flight.
8 March 2024
The Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) opens up a new part of the gravitational wave spectrum as the first space-based detector. It is now officially adopted by the European Space Agency (ESA) as one of its large class missions. Launch is scheduled for the mid-2030s. The Netherlands plays a large role in the development of hardware and software.
26 January 2024
The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) Collaboration, with contribution by Dutch astronomers, has released new images of M87*, the supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy Messier 87, using data from observations taken in April 2018. With the participation of the newly commissioned Greenland Telescope and a dramatically improved recording rate across the array, the 2018 observations give us a view of the source independent from the first observations in 2017. A recent paper titeled “The persistent shadow of the supermassive black hole of M87” published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics presents new images from the 2018 data that reveal a familiar ring the same size as the one observed in 2017. This bright ring surrounds a deep central depression, “the shadow of the black hole,” as predicted by general relativity. Excitingly, the brightness peak of the ring has shifted by about 30º compared to the images from 2017, which is consistent with our theoretical understanding of variability from turbulent material around black holes.
18 January 2024
The mobile planetarium team of the Africa Millimetre Telescope project is honoured by the UK’s Royal Astronomical Society (RAS) with the 2024 Annie Maunder Medal for Outreach. The mobile planetarium is used to bring immersive and interactive astronomy engagement to a diverse spectrum of the Namibian public and help to bridge the gap between scientists and the public as well as top-level government. For these reasons the medal was awarded to the internationally operated project.
12 January 2024
Minister Robbert Dijkgraaf of Education, Culture and Science officially opened the BlackGEM telescope array at ESO's La Silla observatory. BlackGEM consists of three optical telescopes that will be looking for flashes of light from merging black holes and neutron stars. BlackGEM was developed and built by a Dutch/Flemish consortium led by NOVA and Radboud University.
10 January 2024
Per 1 November 2023, Prof. Jessica Dempsey has been appointed Professor by Special Remit (Bijzonder Hoogleraar) in the area of "Ethics of Astronomy" at the Department of Astrophysics of Radboud University.
11 December 2023
Het Nederlandse Zwarte Gaten-Consortium heeft vandaag op de achtste consortium-meeting in Nijmegen een app gelanceerd waarmee burgerwetenschappers kunnen helpen om nieuwgevormde zwarte gaten te vinden. De BlackHoleFinder-app is beschikbaar in de Apple- en Android-appstores en op https://www.blackholefinder.org.
7 December 2023
IMAPP Award (3th and 4th year PhD students) for Scientific Communication IMAPP
6 December 2023
Planets like our Earth, including planets with water, could form even in the harshest known star-forming environments, drenched by hard UV light from massive stars. That is a main result of analyses of new observations of such an environment with the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), conducted by, amongst others, Rens Waters and student Lars Cuijpers from Radboud University. The observations are the first of their kind – before the JWST, this kind of detailed observation had not been possible. This is good news for Earth-like planets, and for life in the universe: there is a great variety of environments in which such planets can form. The results have now been published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.
30 November 2023
An international team of astronomers, co-led by Michiel Min (SRON), has discovered a silicate-based weather system on a fluffy gas planet around the star WASP-107. It is the first time that scientists, including Rens Waters from Radboud University, find clouds and rain made of sand. They also conclude that the temperature deeper in the atmosphere is rising surprisingly rapid. Publication in Nature.
15 November 2023