Not everything that comes close to a black hole is swallowed by it. Black holes can also hurl material away, and that chance turns out to be considerably bigger than previously thought. Martijn Oei's accidental discovery and his subsequent research on it earned him a cum laude promotion on 12 Decemb…

An international team of scientists including Leiden's Joe Callingham has discovered nineteen red dwarf stars that unexpectedly emit radio waves. The outbursts possibly originate from interaction with exoplanets. The results of the research appear in two scientific publications.

Jordy Bouwman and future Sterrewachter Reinout van Weeren have been awarded a Vidi subsidy to set up or expand their own line of research.

The Mathematical Institute has a rather liberal management structure. Tasks and responsibilities are distributed among the staff. Important decisions are taken by consensus. Various organisational divisions are featured below.

What are the 'dark' components of the universe?

PhD defence

PhD defence

This thesis mainly extends the theory of positive operators on Riesz spaces to a setting of pre-Riesz spaces.

More on the Dutch webpage.

Promotor: S.M. Verduyn Lunel, Co-Promotor: O.W. van Gaans

De menselijke geschiedenis strekt zich ver uit vóór de tijd waarin de mensen opschreven wat er zoal gebeurde.

Promotor: S.M. Verduyn Lunel, Co-promotor: O. van Gaans

Promotores: Arjen Doelman, Jens Rademacher, Max Rietkerk

Promotor: S.M. Verduyn Lunel, Co-promotor: O.W. van Gaans

The Dutch-Japanese made DESHIMA instrument has passed its first practical tests when measuring the distances and ages of distant galaxies. The core of the instrument is a chip the size of two euro coins that measures 49 shades of far infrared light. The developers of the spectrometer publish the results…

Promotores: Prof.dr. A.G.G.M. Tielens & Prof.dr. L. Kaper (UvA)

One of the most important puzzles in modern astrophysics is the nature of dark matter.

The high velocity tail of the total velocity distribution of stars provides essential insight into fundamental properties of the Galaxy.

The focus of this thesis is how stars like our Sun and planets like Jupiter, Saturn, and Earth are formed.

With new algorithms and supercomputers, an incredibly detailed radio map of the universe was created. Now astronomers can look at radio data of galaxies with much more precision. This was published in Nature Astronomy by Leiden PhD student Frits Sweijen and colleagues.

Below thesis archives will be moved shortly (work in progress) to the Leiden Repository. Once this is done, theses submitted by MI students (from 2008 onwards) can be accessed via the Repository and will be removed from this site.

PhD defence

An unexpected phenomenon in a merger of a cluster of galaxies. An international team of astronomers led by Francesco de Gasperin has witnessed a gas tail of a galaxy, that slowly extinguished, but then lightened up again

An international team of astronomers has found an unexpected link between dark matter and visible stars in stellar systems. This discovery may even cause us to reconsider our understanding of gravity. They published on their discovery in 'Nature' on 1 October.

For centuries astronomers studied the Universe by collecting light. Nowadays, we are living in times of great technological advancements, which allow us to explore our Universe in a new way - though gravitational wave radiation.

Organic molecules in interstellar space are important as they influence the structure of galaxies and star formations. Studying catalytic processes in space allows us to understand how molecular species are formed and chemically evolved in the interstellar medium and solar system objects.

The solar system was formed approximately 4.56 billion years ago. Despite the numerous theories that have been developed over the years, the formation and evolution of the solar system still remain unclear.

The Astronomy and Data Science master’s specialisation at Leiden University combines advanced Astronomy courses with relevant courses from the Computer Science programme at Leiden University.

An international team of researchers observed the full extent of the evolution of hot gas produced by an active black hole for the first time. As it evolves, the hot gas encompasses a much larger area than previously thought and even impacts objects residing at great distances. Their study is published…

PhD defence

Three projects with Leiden researchers are to receive a subsidy from NWO for the construction or renovation of large-scale research facilities. They will be working on electron microscopy, an X-omics initiative and an X-ray telescope. The projects are part of the National Roadmap for Large-Scale Scientific…

Promotor: S.M. Verduyn Lunel, Co-Promotores: S.C.Hille, O.W. van Gaans

China wordt steeds assertiever in zijn relaties met andere landen, maar achter dit beeld gaat een opmerkelijk diverse maatschappij en politieke realiteit schuil die tal van aanknopingspunten biedt voor samenwerking en verdere integratie van China in de wereld. In China een gids voor de 21e eeuw past…

SRON Netherlands Institute for Space Research is moving. In 2021, the Utrecht branch will settle in South Holland. Assistant professor at TU Delft, Akira Endo leads a project that builds a state-of-the-art instrument for astronomical research. ‘SRON is the key to go from proof-of-concept to a science-grade…

Knowledge that benefits society is the domain of the Faculty of Governance and Global Affairs (FGGA). FGGA provides high-quality interdisciplinary education on and research into social and governance issues such as terrorism, organisation of public administration, climate change and economic crises.

OB associations are loose groups of young, massive stars. They constitute the last stage of the massive starformation process, and the context in which new stars are formed.

The LOFAR e-infrastructure group is responsible for deploying and maintaining LOFAR processing on distributed e-infrastructure. A co-operation between SURFsara, Leiden University and ASTRON, the group develops software to integrate the LOFAR stack with processing pipelines. Our software can schedule…

Managing scarcity to serve the public interest is a classic government task. An important way to execute this task is by allocating individual rights that are only available in limited quantities, such as CO2 emission allowances, gambling licences, subsidies, radio frequencies, public contracts and…

Donald Trump's US election victory is causing major concerns in many countries, including Iran. Afshin Ellian, Professor of Jurisprudence, spoke about this on Dutch all-news radio station BNR: ‘Denying that they're worried is really just for show’.

They are often referred to as ‘The Oscars of the Natural Sciences’: the Breakthrough Prizes in Life Sciences, Fundamental Physics and Mathematics. This year, the prize for physics went to the Event Horizon Telescope team, which took the first-ever picture of a black hole. Four Leiden astronomers were…

From the Big Bang to superconductivity. Many ground-breaking discoveries have been made in Leiden University’s long history.

Combining different disciplines, researchers work together to formulate innovative solutions to societal problems.

We are grief-stricken that our PhD student Maolin Zhang passed away during the early morning of January 17th 2019. He died during a terrible fire that took place at his house in Hillegom.

PhD defence

This thesis is about cosmological inflation and its relation to observations.

Promotor: A.P. IJzerman