Author apatruno
This is a supermassive black hole spotted by Chandra that might weigh as much as 10 billion times the mass of our Sun (Link To the Chandra Website with the Original Image & Explanation)
The European Space Agency has made its final decision: the M3 class mission that will fly in the next decade is the exoplanet mission PLATO. The LOFT observatory, a competing high energy mission, arrived close second and will not be funded in… Continue Reading →
Many of us have recently seen in the media the shocking news that Stephen Hawking has claimed that “there are no black holes”. But did Hawking really propose that black holes do not exist?
(Update: one paper is now published http://iopscience.iop.org/2041-8205/781/1/L3/) Today I’d like to tell a brief story and discuss three recent papers accepted or submitted to The Astrophysical Journal & The Astrophysical Journal Letters (and make some self-promotion as I’ve been involved… Continue Reading →
How many times have we heard the question “are we alone in the Universe”? Does life exist somewhere else? Does intelligent life exist? There’s no need to introduce the topic, as countless discussions have been made through the centuries. Still,… Continue Reading →
Turbulence is a common chaotic phenomenon that everyone has certainly experienced: you witness the development of turbulence when you stir a coffee too vigorously or watch the smoke of a cigarette or feel the aeroplane going up and down. What… Continue Reading →
Triggered by the idea of J. Hessel while I was working at ASTRON, I decided to create a new pulsar catalog that includes all radio, gamma, and accreting millisecond pulsars known. The list is updated but of course omissions and… Continue Reading →
Nowadays astronomical data is recorded in two ways. Either remotely, for example with space telescopes, or in ground based observatories. In the latter case however, astronomers do not usually perform the observation by themselves, but they propose which object (and… Continue Reading →
I am mostly an observer working in the field of high energy astrophysics, doing experiments and performing observations with space and ground-based telescopes. However, once in a while I also like very much to use numerical codes to solve complex… Continue Reading →
Accreting Millisecond X-Ray Pulsars are amazing objects (see also my research page in the section “Accreting Millisecond X-ray pulsars”). They are neutron stars that orbit around a relatively small star like our Sun or less massive and eat gas from… Continue Reading →