Daily Image
30-01-2012
A Cum Laude for Reinout's clusters!
| Submitter: | Raffaella Morganti, Raymond Oonk |
| Description: | On December 20th one of our recently acquired postdocs, Reinout van Weeren, successfully defended his PhD thesis in Leiden. The thesis on "Radio Emission from Merging Galaxy Clusters", was supervised by Huub Rottgering and the picture shows the exciting moment of Reinout receiving his doctorate, Cum Laude (met lof)!! Congratulations! Reinout's thesis focused on detecting radio emission from radio halos and relics in galaxy clusters. These halos and relics are diffuse radio sources, unrelated to individual galaxies. The picture emerging about their origin is that the diffuse radio emission is often related to galaxy cluster merger events. Thus, relics trace cluster merger shock waves resulting from these powerful encounters. Reinout has used for his work a lot of different radio facilities (WSRT, VLA and GMRT). Even more remarkable is the use of LOFAR Reinout has made in order to image his favorite cluster, Abell 2256, at low frequencies, including the impressive achievement of imaging the diffuse emission in this cluster at frequencies as low as 20 MHz! The paper presenting these results is likely going to be the first refereed LOFAR imaging paper. He has also used space-based X-ray telescopes (Chandra and XMM-NEWTON) to study how hot thermal intra-cluster medium responds to the merger and the associated shocks seen in the radio regime. During his PhD work Reinout was a frequent guest at ASTRON, deeply involved in the commissioning of LOFAR. Now, he has joined for a short postDoc the Astronomy Group and he is helping out in the MSSS enterprise. Good luck for your future carrier, full of exciting LOFAR results! |
| Copyright: | Reinout van Weeren |
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