CERN has approved the construction and operation of SND@LHC, a neutrino detector at the Large Hadron Collider. It's a precursor for SHiP, a detector meant to detect dark matter. Leiden physicist Alexey Boyarsky is one of the initiators of both SHiP and SND@LHC.

With the lecture 'China and a complicated world', a lucky draw, and of course lots of food and drinks, the Faculty of Science celebrated the year of the dog. An international mix of staff and students took part in this third local edition of the lunar new year celebration.

SRON Netherlands Institute for Space Research is moving. In 2021, the Utrecht branch of the institute will be located in South-Holland. Leiden professor Paul van der Werf sees the move as a great enrichment: ‘It will all be much easier when SRON is located here behind us in the parking lot two years…

The success of Dutch radio astronomy in the last century was largely due to Leiden astronomer Jan Hendrik Oort. He made astute use of circumstances in the post-war period. Historian Astrid Elbers' research focuses on this golden period.

The new open access book The Science of Citizen Science bundles insights into science that is conducted together with citizens, to promote this growing form of science.

Christopher Berg Smiet, who defended his thesis at LION with Dirk Bouwmeester, won the Christiaan Huygens prize for his thesis '‘Knots in Plasma’. On 7 October, he received a certificate, a bronze statuette and ten thousand euros.

What does it mean for a citizen to be ‘literate’ in astronomy? Astronomers who participate in outreach to the general public experience various degrees of astronomical knowledge among people. But so far, there had not been a systematic evaluation and definition of what astronomical literacy actually…

From a new generation of antibiotics and more-effective vaccines to a map of dark matter and new light on Hindu traditions. Four researchers from Leiden University have received a prestigious €2.5m ERC Advanced Grant to develop their research.

The Faculty of Science has received no less than seven Veni grants this year. Camila Correa, Max van Duijn, Stéphanie van der Pas, Sergii Pud, Mónica Varela Álvarez, Joseph Callingham, and Melissa McClure will receive a maximum of 250,000 euros to further develop their own research ideas over a three-year…

Does gravity work the same when you look at the largest scales in our universe? That’s what Leiden physicist Alessandra Silvestri will study with a 2 million euro ERC Consolidator grant. ‘We assume that it does, but we don’t actually know.’

How are stars and planets formed? Is life outside Earth possible? These questions are being researched by Professor of Molecular Astrophysics Ewine van Dishoeck at Leiden University. Her pioneering work has earned her the Kavli prize in the category of astrophysics. The prize consists of 1,000,000 dollars…

The Clinical Epidemiology department at the LUMC has set up a series of lectures for asylum seekers. The series has become a huge success.

Astronomers at ASTRON and Leiden University have used the LOFAR radio telescope to discover a 'brown dwarf' – a faint object more massive than Jupiter, but significantly less massive than the Sun. The discovery of the object dubbed Elegast, opens up a new path that uses radio telescopes to discover…

Leiden Professor of Astronomy Mike Garrett is searching for signs of extraterrestrial intelligence. In his Kaiser lecture on 23 April he will discuss how far science has progressed in this quest.

The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) collaboration receives the 2021 Royal Astronomical Society Group Achievement Award. In April 2019, the EHT team presented the first-ever photograph of the shadow of a black hole. Leiden professor Huib-Jan van de Langevelde has been director of EHT since last year. Three…

Astronomers led by Leiden astronomer Sebastiaan Haffert have directly imaged two planets that are gravitationally carving out a wide gap within a planet-forming disk surrounding a young star. While over a dozen exoplanets have been directly imaged, this is only the second multi-planet system to be p…

Astronomy departments at Dutch universities is among the top of the world rankings for astronomical institutions. This is the conclusion drawn from a recent evaluation of the Netherlands Research School for Astronomy (NOVA) and the astronomy institutions of the University of Amsterdam, the University…

The ICT.OPEN conference had no less than five Leiden highlights. PhD candidate Anna Louise Latour won the pitch prize of 500 euros and PhD candidate Can Wang won the second prize in the Commit2Data poster competition. In addition, Professor Holger Hoos gave the keynote lecture on the first day and Suzan…

The year 2023 saw the earthquake in Turkey and Syria, the Wagner Group rebellion and wildfires and floods as all the weather records were smashed. Our most-read stories were about the climate crisis and the elections: here’s the list.

For the first time, scientists have traced back a high-energy neutrino to its source in space. It was produced by a so-called blazar—a supermassive black hole. Researchers from neutrino detector IceCube report this in Science. ‘This is a milestone for neutrino science,’ says physicist Dorothea Samtleben…

He makes music, goes to the athletics track twice a week and, according to his supervisor, has done his research so well that it would not be out of place in a PhD research. Physics and astronomy student Hidde Stoffels' undergraduate research on the properties of dark matter is of such high quality…

Cosmologists can measure with increasing precision how the universe is expanding and changing. This is producing unexpected results and causing cracks in our picture of the universe. At the ESOF session The Dark Side of our Mysterious Universe, cosmologists, astronomers and philosophers will discuss…

An international team of researchers led by astronomers from Leiden University (the Netherlands) has produced the first sharp radio maps of the universe at low frequencies. Thanks to a new calibration technique, they bypassed the disturbances of the Earth's ionosphere. They used the new method to study…

Festival, Graduation Ceremony

Festival, Graduation ceremony

PhD defence

Festival, Graduation ceremony

Lecture, Journalism Studies Seminars

Festival, Graduation ceremony

PhD defence

PhD defence

Lecture

Lecture

PhD defence

Lecture, Kaiser Spring Lecture

The brightness peak of the ring around M87's supermassive black hole has shifted 30 degrees counterclockwise in a year. This is shown by new images released by the Event Horizon Telescope consortium.

Graduation ceremony

Graduation ceremony

Graduation Ceremony

Graduation Ceremony

Graduation Ceremony

Graduation Ceremony

Graduation Ceremony

Graduation Ceremony