Promotor: Prof.dr. M. Franx, Co-Promotor: Rychard Bouwens

The directorate of Leiden Observatory consists of the Scientific Director, the Director of Education and the Director of Operations.

Today, everybody and everything produces data. People produce large amounts of data in social networks and in commercial transactions. Medical, corporate, and government databases continue to grow. Sensors continue to get cheaper and are increasingly connected, creating an Internet of Things, and generating…

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.

The intracluster medium (ICM) is a hot, tenuous and X-ray emitting gas that pervades galaxy clusters.

This thesis investigates the evolution and fate of gaseous exoplanets, which are continuously shaped by stellar activity across both short and long timescales.

Forming at the nodes of the Cosmic Web and growing hierarchically via mass accretion, galaxy clusters are the largest virialized halos in our universe, composed of dark matter (DM; ≥85%), ionized hot plasma in the intracluster medium (ICM; ≥10-15%), and galaxies (≥1-5%).

The highly successful deep-sea telescope KM3NeT can now expand both its size and scope. Using a new type of microphone for underwater use, the telescope will attempt to detect the sound produced by neutrinos as they travel through the sea. The data collected will also be of great interest to other research…

The highly successful deep-sea telescope KM3NeT can now expand both its size and scope. Using a new type of microphone for underwater use, the telescope will attempt to detect the sound produced by neutrinos as they travel through the sea. The data collected will also be of great interest to other research…

Leiden Observatory is the astronomical institute of the Faculty of Science of Leiden University.

Mathematician Robbin Bastiaansen, physicist Irene Battisti, pharmacist Fouzia Lghoul-Oulad Saïd and physics and astronomy student Maite Boden are the winners of the annual prizes of the Faculty of Science. Boden was honoured as the first Young Star, a new prize for the best bachelor’s student of the…

This is an Erasmus+ International Credit Mobility project of the Faculty of Science with two universities in Armenia.

These are the proposed research projects for LEAPS 2019. Please note that not all projects will go ahead and some may still be added in the near future. Final funding decisions lie with the Faculty sponsors. And please make a note that if you are interested in an ESA project, to check if your state…

Are you interested in taking up an extra challenge during your master’s programme? Have you thought about applying for our Summer School programme or are you interested in developing your personal leadership style?

Are you interested in taking up an extra challenge during your Astronomy master’s programme? Have you thought about applying for our Summer School programme or are you interested in developing your personal leadership style?

Of the 111 Spinoza Prizes that have been awarded since 1995, 28 have gone to researchers from Leiden University.

Researchers at Leiden Observatory study the fundamental physics that creates structure in the Universe. These processes collect matter into galaxies and gas into stars. With the use of powerful telescopes and advanced calculations and computer simulations, Leiden astronomers seek to understand the origin,…

At Leiden Observatory, researchers investigate the origin of stars and their planetary systems. They detect and characterize planets around other stars (exoplanets). They study how stars and planets form. And they follow molecules from interstellar clouds to nascent planet systems. This way they address…

Are you interested in taking up an extra challenge during your Astronomy master’s programme? Have you thought about applying for our Summer School programme or are you interested in developing your personal leadership style?

By carrying out fundamental research and providing excellent education, universities become a breeding ground for innovation and entrepreneurship.

Promotor: Jelle S. Kaastra Co-promotor: Jelle de Plaa

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.

In this thesis, the research focuses on the properties of dark matter and dark matter haloes and how they connect with the galaxies we can observe in the Universe.

Promotores: S.F. Portegies Zwart, E. M. Rossi

This thesis focuses on protoplanetary disks: flattened structures of gas and dust around young stars in which planets are expected to form and grow.

Outflows are crucially important for the gas budget and evolution of luminous star-forming galaxies and AGNs, with observed mass outflow rates of the same order as the star formation rate. Greater star formation and black hole growth lead to more intense feedback and outflows, resulting in self-regulated…

Until the 1990s, the only known planets were those in our Solar System. Three decades later, several thousand exoplanets have been discovered orbiting stars other than the Sun, and substantial efforts have been made to explore these strange new worlds through spectroscopic analyses of their atmosphe…

I have studied the hot, diffuse gas around and between galaxies. Specifically, I have used the EAGLE numerical simulations of galaxy formation to predict the properties of this gas, and I have used those properties to predict specific observables: soft X-ray absorption and emission lines.

The work presented in this thesis is based on ALMA surveys of protoplanetary disks in three star-forming regions: Lupus, OMC-2, and NGC 2024.

To address the fundamental questions of how life on Earth emerged and how common life may be in the Universe, it is crucial to know the chemical composition of the planet-forming material.

The physical origin of the dozens of stellar-mass binaries, the mergers of which have been detected by the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA collaboration via gravitational waves, is still unknown.

A large diversity of exoplanetary systems has been found, but it is still unclear what drives this diversity.

Promotor: Prof.dr. E.F. van Dishoeck, Co-Promotor: M.R. Hogerheijde

Promotor: J.S. Kaastra Co-promotor: E. Constantini

Galaxy intrinsic alignments induce a major astrophysical contamination to weak gravitational lensing measurements and need to be modelled and mitigated when extracting cosmological information from such measurements.

Stars like the sun are born in large molecular clouds existing from gas and dust. During the formation process, the chemical composition of the material can be altered drastically by the changing physical conditions.

Understanding the formation and evolution of planetary systems is one of the most fundamental challenges in astronomy. To directly image and study young exoplanets and the circumstellar disks they form from, dedicated high-contrast imaging instruments are built.

Over the last three decades, the discovery of exoplanets has revealed the boundless variety of worlds beyond our own Solar System⁠. Majority of planetary systems contain short-period planets that are larger than Earth but smaller than Neptune⁠.

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

This thesis focuses on the X-ray spectral analysis of merging galaxy clusters and the plasma code development for future high-resolution X-ray spectroscopy observations.

This thesis examines the link between simple molecules and the underlying structure and chemistry within protoplanetary disks - the birthplaces of planets.

My work focuses on a class of astronomical objects called protoplanetary disks.

This thesis focusses on the temperature structure in protoplanetary disks. The relation between structures seen in the dust and gas-phase molecules is investigated.

One of the key discoveries in exoplanet research over the past decade is the abundance of small planets in our Milky Way. Despite their high numbers, our understanding of their atmospheres remains limited, and it is unknown if they possess atmospheres at all.

Tracing the evolution of the molecular gas content in galaxies is critical for a complete understanding of galaxy formation and evolution, as it provides the direct fuel for star formation. Studies of high-redshift (z>1) molecular gas reservoirs, most commonly traced by carbon monoxide (CO), have seen…