Professor of Theoretical High Energy Astrophysics
Anton Pannekoek Institute for Astronomy/GRAPPA
University of Amsterdam
Science Park 904, rm. C4.151
1098 XH Amsterdam, Netherlands
T +31 20 525 7478/7491
s.b.markoff@uva.nl

I work at the interface of Astrophysics and Astroparticle Physics, and am interested in a variety of problems relating to the accretion process especially around black holes, both big and small.  I am a member of the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) Collaboration, serving on its Science Council from 2016-2022 (Vice Chair from 2019), and now sit on its Science Board.  I also co-coordinate the Multi-Wavelength Science WG, and am a member of the Cherenkov Telescope Array Project.  I am currently co-PI of the ERC Synergy Grant “BlackHolistic” to better understand black holes of all scales, including building a new mm-radio dish in Namibia (the Africa Millimeter Telescope, or AMT) in partnership with the University of Namibia.  By augmenting the EHT array with the AMT we will be able to make the first movies of the event horizon region of a supermassive black hole, as well as use the AMT on its own to study transient black hole outbursts.


Group Blog

Astro Quantum Billiards Part 2 – How Can Light Be Bounced to Ultra-High Energies?

In my earlier blog post (part 1), I posed the question of how some of the most energetic gamma-rays observed by the LHAASO and HAWC observatories can be created. In order to understand their origin, I drew an intuitive picture of how a photon can scatter off an electron at rest, usually called Compton scattering. The goal of this part is to take this a step further towards inverse Compton scattering, the case when the electron is instead moving at almost the speed of light. Inverse Compton scattering In all the earlier situations in part 1, the photon energy decreased or stayed the same at most. To increase the photon energy, i.e. transfer energy from the electron to the... Continue reading →

Latest News

Bringing the band back together!

First, the new news

It’s the start of a new year so of course I made a bunch of resolutions that likely won’t stick, but one of them was to start doing more research blogging on our site, and to encourage my group to do better here too, after a longish hiatus. Why the hiatus? At least from my side I guess the fallout from the pandemic has been … Continue reading →

Where I Am / Will Be

[gcal id="760" type="list" interval="events" paging="false" events-count="4" offset_direction="forward"]