On Monday 9 May Mercury will pass between the Earth and the Sun. This rare event can be followed in the Leiden Observatory. The Observatory's new solar telescope produces a very clear image and offers a unique opportunity to observe Mercury at the highest magnification possible in the Netherlands.

A new VICI Project led by Dr. Petra Sijpesteijn. More information on the PhD and postdoc positions will be published soon.

A new VICI Project led by Dr. Petra Sijpesteijn. More information on the PhD and postdoc postiions will be published soon

Astronomers at Leiden University have discovered the first planets using a new instrument: the planet hunter MASCARA. This instrument, developed at Leiden Observatory, looks specifically for planet transitions around the brightest stars in the sky, which surprisingly enough have so far have hardly been…

Robin de Jong

Port cities develop at the intersection of international trade and commerce and at the interface between sea and land. What does the future of port cities look like with urbanization, sea level rise, new migrant flows and the disappearance of old industries? This is addressed in the minor (Re)Imagining…

Astronomers from, among others, SRON and Leiden Observatory have discovered long-sought intergalactic gas with ESA’s space telescope XMM-Newton. This gas is one of the pieces of the puzzle to map the total amount of ‘normal’ matter in the universe. The research will be published in Nature on 21 June…

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…

The strangest things come out at night. This is the motto of the Leiden Museum Night due to take place on 28 May. Leiden University is once again playing a key part.

On Monday 27 September 2010 Spinoza prize winners Naomi Ellemers, Ineke Sluiter, Marijn Franx (Leiden) and Piet Gros (Utrecht) announced their plans for their €2.5 million prize money. This was during the official ceremony in The Hague, at which the outgoing Secretary of State for Education, Culture…

Glycoside hydrolases (glycosidases/GHs) are widely abundant enzymes in all kingdoms of life and are important biocatalysts that catalyze the hydrolysis of glycosidic linkages in oligo/polysaccharides, glycoproteins and glycolipids with tremendous efficiency

As museums face more scrutiny and are being demanded to decolonize, there are opportunities for Dominican museums to adopt a critical perspective and turn their collections and exhibitions into connections to our cultural past, present, and future.

My research focusses on site-specific compositional and performance practices of music for organ and electronics and their musical-spatial values.

For the first time in over half a century, one of oldest telescopes at the Leiden Observatory is getting a major improvement.

Peter Webb is one of the four young Leiden Humanities researchers to receive a Veni grant from the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO). Webb will use the funding for his project EPIC PASTS: PRE-ISLAM THROUGH MUSLIM EYES, to reevaluate the ways in which Muslims in early Islam remembered…

The Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research NWO allocates nearly € 19.5 million to a Dutch cluster that contributes to the development of an X-ray camera and spectrograph for the new European space telescope Athena. Leiden Observatory is one of the members of the cluster.

The Leiden astronomer Huib van Langevelde) has been selected as the new director of the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT). The EHT is a collaboration involving about 350 scientists from 18 countries. It combines the ALMA array in Chile with sub-millimeter telescopes around the world and published the first…

We investigate the buildup of galaxies from various vantage points. The first two chapters focus on the stellar content of galaxies, especially the distribution of stellar masses at birth and potential variations therein in various galactic environments.

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…

For the first time more than half century, one of oldest telescopes at Leiden Observatory is getting a major improvement.

KM3NeT is selected as one of the ten top research facilities in NWO’s National Roadmap for Large-scale Research Infrastructure. Leiden physicist Dorothea Samtleben is the deputy program leader of Nikhef’s KM3NeT group.

On 18 June 2019, Neta Palkovitz Menashy defended her thesis 'Regulating a Revolution: Small Satellites and the Law of Outer Space'. The doctoral research was supervised by Prof. dr. P.M.J. Mendes de Leon and Prof. dr. G. Molier.

The International Space University is proud to announce that the 31st annual Space Studies Program (SSP) session will convene in the Netherlands during the summer of 2018.

Scientists at Leiden University (Netherlands), Stuttgart University (Germany) and Ural Federal University (Russia) have successfully put forward a novel, computed, reaction mechanism that was experimentally tested and show that formaldehyde is formed at much earlier stages in the birthplaces of stars…

Commercial MRI systems cost millions of euros to purchase and require highly trained technicians to operate. Prof. Andrew Webb works on accessible MRI techniques that offer new opportunities in both developed and developing countries. Webb is a professor at the Radiology Department of the LUMC and,…

A permanent exhibition on the place of humans in the cosmos. This is something Franx wants to use his Spinoza Prize for. ‘So much progress has been made that we are still trying to define the questions. In finding the answers we are constantly coming up against surprises.’

Chapter by Fabio Cristiano and Emilio Distretti for the volume The Aesthetics and Politics of the Online Self, edited by Donatella Della Ratta, Geert Lovink, Teresa Numerico, and Peter Sarram for Palgrave Macmillan.

This book explores the relationship between the production of new urban spaces and illiberal community-making in contemporary India. It is based on an ethnographic study in Noida, a city at the eastern fringe of the state of Uttar Pradesh, bordering national capital Delhi.

An international team of astronomers, with researchers at Leiden Observatory playing a leading role, has mapped the fuel for galaxy formation in the iconic Hubble Ultra Deep Field. The results of the research have been accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal.

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On 25 January 2024 H.J. Pak successfully defended a doctoral thesis and graduated.

This thesis describes the Multi-site All-Sky CAmeRA (MASCARA), which consists of two small robotic telescope designed to detect exoplanets around the brightest stars in the sky.

For the first time in the Netherlands this summer: the Space Studies Programme - an international summer university for those who aspire to a space career. In parallel: the Sizzling Summer of Space, which is a public programme for both young and old.

Green infrastrucuture (GI) like urban farm and green roofs could provide many beneficial functions in cities. These include for example food production, flood prevention or increasing biodiversity. MultiGreen project aims at developing an integrated modelling tool to support…

Promotor: Prof.dr. H.V.J. Linnartz, Co-Promotores: S. Ioppolo, H.M. Cuppen

Even though more than 4000 extra-solar planets are known today, only a small fraction of these has been captured in an image. To better understand the planet formation mechanisms in solar-like environments we started the Young Suns Exoplanet Survey (YSES).

An international team of astronomers that includes researchers from Leiden has discovered the most distant galaxy yet. The galaxy, called EGS8p7, is 13.23 billion light years away from Earth and already existed when the universe was only 550 million years old.

If there is life outside our galaxy, how could we find it? In his Oort Lecture, James Kasting talks about his search for simple life on other planets. Kasting was in the Netherlands for two weeks, because he was invited as the Oort Professor 2018.

This book contextualises case studies across a wide variety of languages and cultures, crystallising key interrelationships between linguistic standardisation and prescriptivism, and between ideas and practices. It focuses on different traditions of standardisation and prescription throughout the world…

Plant diversity is essential for us and our planet as it sustains the stability of our ecosystems, provides vital materials and food to us and supports many ecosystem services.

On the 20th of June, Camil Staps successfully defended a doctoral thesis. Leiden University Centre for Linguistics congratulates Camil on this achievement!

The ongoing increase in antimicrobial resistance combined with the low discovery of novel antibiotics is a serious threat to our health care.

This doctoral thesis elaborates Langacker’s reference-point model by applying it to lexical semantics.

My PhD project studies how the temporally sequential Hox gene expression is regulated during head-tail patterning of the frog embryo.

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…

The project ‘Founding an Inclusive Space’ investigates the histories of various LGBT+ archives in the Netherlands, Germany and the United Kingdom.

This research combines archaeological, archaeometric and ethnohistorical research to study the organisation of settlement space and residence rules among the Taino Indians during the Late Ceramic Age (AD 1000-1492).