Summary of the GRAPPA retreat – April 3-4 2019 Sera has organized several retreats for her group in the past. We usually bike to this picturesque farm in Weesp and spend the day in a meeting room surrounded by sheep. We use this meeting to focus and plan our research efforts, practice giving elevator/grant pitches, and discussing common challenges and how to overcome them. For a nice overview, see this excellent blog post by Tobi Beuchert. While I always thought that GRAPPA wasn’t running as smoothly as possible, I was doubtful of a “GRAPPA retreat”, but at the very least, I would finally get to know everyone. When I arrived…

Supermassive black holes are powerful engines. A black hole with the mass of a million-10 billion times the mass of the Sun is fueled by gas surrounding it. A small fraction of these systems accelerate particles in a collimated outflow of plasma, called jet. Many questions about AGN jets remain unanswered: How are those jets launched? Which particles are accelerated in a jet? We know that electrons (and positrons) are in a jet, as we see linearly polarized synchrotron emission from these jets in the radio-X-ray wavelengths. Electrons in the magnetic field of the jet gyrate and produce the light we see. However, it is not clear whether protons are…

I’m Dr. Felicia Krauss and I have been working in Amsterdam for two years. I focus on multimessenger and multiwavelength aspects of black hole systems; Galactic black holes (~10 times the mass of our Sun) and supermassive black holes (One million to 1 billion times the mass of the Sun; this equals the total mass of a small galaxy within a tiny region at the center of these systems). Supermassive black hole systems are often called active galactic nuclei (AGN), because they are very bright and located at the center of their galaxy. Both types of system are very similar. The black hole is a central engine that uses fuel…