Op zaterdag 16 oktober opent de bijzondere tentoonstelling Onder onze hemel (origineel Shared Sky), een culturele blik op de sterrenhemel door Aboriginal Australische en Zuid-Afrikaanse artiesten, in de Oude Sterrewacht in Leiden.
STORIES
Using the world’s most powerful radio telescope, LOFAR, scientists have discovered stars unexpectedly blasting out radio waves, possibly indicating the existence of hidden planets.
By connecting two of the biggest radio telescopes in the world, astronomers have discovered that a simple binary wind cannot cause the puzzling periodicity of a Fast Radio Burst after all.
DAILY IMAGE
Radio studies of strongly-magnetized accreting neutron stars
© Image submitted by speaker as part of their work.
X-ray binaries, wherein a star orbits in a close orbit around a compact object, are the testbed for a wide range of topics, from accretion theory and general relativity to binary evolution and neutron star physics. These systems routinely launch jets from their inner accretion flow, as observed in the radio band.
Because X-ray binaries evolve on short time scales, are numerous, and close-by, they offer a unique probe to understand the launch of these jets. However, a large subset of X-ray binaries have so far not been explored for this purpose: the roughly half of X-ray binaries hosting a strongly-magnetized (B>1e12 G) neutron star as its accretor.
Where these X-ray binaries long remained too radio faint to study, new sensitive radio telescopes have now brought them into view. I will review here our renewed efforts to study jets launched by such strongly-magnetized neutron stars, highlighting the particular challenges caused by their faintness and their massive donor stars, and discussing the implications on jet launching models
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CAREERS
