This thesis aims to enhance our understanding of galaxies by testing theoretical models of galaxy formation against observations, particularly in the cases of extreme systems which have been found to have an excess of baryonic mass in their central regions, in the form of either supermassive black holes…

Pulsars were first discovered in 1967 and since then the population has grown and expanded over several wavelengths.

It all started with demonstrations protesting about the death of George Floyd from police brutality in Minneapolis, but the Black Lives Matter protest is spreading like wildfire across the whole of the US. Every day, thousands of people are taking to the streets. We asked American Studies expert Sara…

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…

Libraries in the Netherlands are removing books that contain references to Black Pete. According to the director of the Public Library Association, a logical and fitting response in the spirit of the times.

All supermassive black holes in the centres of galaxies appear to have periods when they swallow matter from their close surroundings. But that is about as far as the similarities go. That's the conclusion reached by British and Dutch astronomers from their research with ultra-sensitive radio telescopes…

How do we account for historical power dynamics when writing new histories of slavery and emancipation? What critical methods can we employ when studying preserved archives and collections? A new book series aims to address these questions. The initiators Karwan Fatah-Black and Ilse Josepha Lazaroms…

Touring the campus, meeting current students and taking part in an interactive seminar in the Lipsius building. After 1,5 years of online events due to the corona pandemic, a live Student for a Day took place again on Friday 24 September.

The Ager Venusinus Project studies the relatively small number of recognized colonial dwellings dated securely to the period of colonization (i.e. the 3rd century BC). With a special interest in the Black Gloss ceramic typochronology

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…

The Sun and all the stars in the night sky reside in the Milky Way galaxy. In the at-rest reference frame of the Galaxy, typical stars travel with velocities of about 100-200 kilometres per second.

An Active Galactic Nucleus (AGN) is a highly luminous region at the center of a galaxy, powered by the accretion into a supermassive black hole and emitting energy from radio waves to gamma rays, often outshining the host galaxy.

The orbits of 27 stars orbiting closely around the black hole at the center of our Milky Way are very chaotic. As a result, researchers cannot predict with confidence where they will be in about 462 years. ‘That is astonishingly short,’ says astronomer Simon Portegies Zwart who collaborated on the r…

The Archaeology and Epigraphy of Jordan’s North-Eastern Desert and Beyond

George Floyd's death still leads to fierce protests against police violence and racism on a daily basis in the United States and abroad. We asked Paul Wouters how he experiences these developments and what this will mean for our faculty.

Promotor: Prof.dr. S.F. Portegies Zwart

The thesis deals with the study of giant radio galaxies (GRGs), which are radio galaxies of megaparsec sizes.

Inaugural lecture, delivered upon acceptance of the Chair in Theory of Research in the Arts, at the Faculty of Humanities, Leiden University, on 10 February 2017, by Professor H.A. (Henk) Borgdorff.

At the initiative and expense of His Royal Highness King Willem-Alexander, Leiden University will be conducting a study of the role of the House of Orange-Nassau in Dutch colonial history. The project will run from 2023 to 2026.

In this thesis, we use low-frequency and high-frequency radio observations to address the following questions regarding quasars: is the radio loud/quiet quasar dichotomy real?

The project seeks to come to an understanding of the archaeology of the desert and the ways in which its inhabitants engaged with their constraint, marginal environments through time. It compares and interprets site distribution and community organisation over a long time scale and across several different…

This dissertation addresses the position of artistic research within academia.

Lecture, Oort lecture

This new handbook by Frits Naerebout and Henk Singor places the history of the Greeks and Romans within the larger context of the contemporary Eurasian world.

The updated E-Primer expands its proven combination of simple explanations, interesting tutorials and fun exercises, and makes even the novice student quickly confident to create their dream experiment​​​​​​ in E-Prime 3. E-Prime is the leading software suite by Psychology Software Tools for designing…

We cover the entire spectrum from target identification to the evaluation of the efficacy and safety of novel medicines in clinical practice.

On 26 October, Hetty ten Oever defended the thesis 'Healthcare Purchase Agreement: The legal relationship between the health insurer and the care provider from a contract law perspective. The doctoral research was supervised by Henk Snijders and Iris Houben

This thesis presents pioneering work on the panchromatic emission of some of the most luminous galaxies in the early Universe: star forming galaxies and active galactic nuclei.

The project examines the political conflict in the Red River Valley of Louisiana between the majority-black Republican Party and the overwhelmingly white Democratic Party by studying the composition and actions of each party.

The first photo of a black hole and measuring anxiety in the brain... From 13 until 22 May we're serving a free slice of science with your pizza.

Through the clever use of two types of telescopes, a team of researchers has produced stunning images of clusters of galaxies. This not only produces beautiful images, but also provides more information about the enormous amounts of energy released around supermassive black holes in clusters. The astronomers,…

Truth is stranger than fiction. In 1997 Juan Maldaceña discovered a remarkable dictionary that translates equation for equation the physics of black holes in string theory into the more conventional physics of quantum mechanics of interacting particles. The remarkable possibility exists that…

When galaxies collide, do the black holes at their centre form a supersized black hole? This is what we think happens, but it's not as simple as that, according to Simon Portegies Zwart. Zwart, computer scientist and astronomer, has been awarded a VICI grant to research this phenomenon.

In the South African context, certain iconic images have been a dominant source for public understandings of historical events. The emphasis given these images tends to overshadow the historical value of other more personal photographic sources – like studio or amateur photography. This project looks…

Rossi

Piercing through the skull with an ice pick, administering electric shocks without an anaesthetic, or applying leeches to the uterus: these may seem like medieval methods of torture, but they are in fact therapies used in medicine. Willem van der Does writes about all of them in his new book. ‘Physicians…

The Cide Archaeological Project: Surveying the Turkish Western Black Sea Region

This thesis explores the theoretical and observational properties of distant massive galaxies that harbour active black holes in their centres and shine brightly at radio wavelengths.

When a star gets too close to a supermassive black hole, it is torn apart by strong tidal forces in a tidal disruption event (TDE).

Henk Versnel's work on ancient religion has been seminal. For his 80th birthday, a group of scholars assembled to celebrate and analyze his oeuvre.

As one of the most influential ideas in modern European history, democracy has fundamentally reshaped not only the landscape of governance, but also social and political thought throughout the world.

One of the current research projects funded by the profile area Political Legitimacy is

From the 1920s on, popular music in Southeast Asia was a mass-audience phenomenon that drew new connections between indigenous musical styles and contemporary genres from elsewhere to create new, hybrid forms. This book presents a cultural history of modern Southeast Asia from the vantage point of popular…

A stretchy sheet over a bowl representing space, a marble on it's surface creating a dimple, deforming space. Simple classroom experiments like these are featured in new educational videos by AstroEDU. In the videos Leiden astronomers Maria Cristina Fortuna and Henk Hoekstra explain what we know of…

Smart algorithms and powerful processors are just as essential for astronomy as big telescopes. Astronomers at Leiden University therefore constantly operate at the interface between astronomy and data science.

The origin and evolution of galaxies are closely linked to many different physical phenomena.

This is an Erasmus+ International Credit Mobility project of Leiden University’s Faculty of Humanities with Anton de Kom University in Suriname.