@hfalcke@mastodon.social avatar

hfalcke

@hfalcke@mastodon.social

Prof. Astrophysics, columnist D/NL, bestseller author “Licht im Dunkeln/Light in the Darkness/Licht in de duisternis” about the first ever image of a black hole shadow with the Event Horizon Telescope, that I was deeply involved in. Work at Radboud University, Nijmegen (NL), live near Cologne (D). Am a happy European, Christian, dad, and granddad.

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.

franco_vazza, to Astro
@franco_vazza@mastodon.social avatar

Sources of magnetic fields appear in this universe - which just samples the first ~1/10 of evolution of a big 2048^3 simulations running on LEONARDO at CINECA (using a customised version of the ENZO code), and it just samples a thin slice through the simulation.

Magnetic field strength on the left, gas density on the right.
The injection of magnetic fields here only follows the onset of star formation (and later on of active galactic nuclei).

#SimulatedUniverses
#astrodon #astronomy

video/mp4

hfalcke,
@hfalcke@mastodon.social avatar

@franco_vazza So, what is the most likely origin of cosmic magnetic fields and where can I read about it. (Asking for a friend who is writing a book).

hfalcke,
@hfalcke@mastodon.social avatar

@franco_vazza that is very interesting and extremely useful. It will take some digesting. The book will be very general, so not all those details can be covered, but the basic question of where the magnetic fields that protect us in our atmosphere come from ultimately is a very interesting one. it could be as complex as the formation of the planet itself, and have the same fundamental origin.

hfalcke, to random
@hfalcke@mastodon.social avatar

There are days when you really don’t want to look at Mastodon. What a terrible place today. Everybody and their brothers and sisters are posting their pictures of the . I have never seen one and when I went outside it was cloudy🙄. I will probably take a break and check in again when this “storm” is over … 😭

hfalcke, to Astronomy German
@hfalcke@mastodon.social avatar

Wonderful news. The Gruber Foundation presents the 2024 Cosmology Prize to Marcia Rieke for pioneering work on astronomical instrumentation to reveal the breadth and details of the infrared universe.
https://gruber.yale.edu

(She was actually my teacher at the Vatican Summer School in 1993 and later I sat next to her at the MMT in Arizona conducting near-infrared observations. What a great person and scientist!)

vicgrinberg, (edited ) to random
@vicgrinberg@mastodon.social avatar

Today I'll be introducing X-ray astronomy (in German!) to a bunch of medical doctors at the RöKo (Röntgenkongress https://www.roentgenkongress.de/roeko-wiesbaden/) Wiesbaden as an invited highlight talk. Kinda a fun audience and very different from a normal one 😳

hfalcke,
@hfalcke@mastodon.social avatar

@vicgrinberg @knud @leo if you strap a person to the front of Chandra and point at Sco X-1 for a few months 🤔

hfalcke, (edited )
@hfalcke@mastodon.social avatar

@vicgrinberg @knud @leo As much as I would love to go into space, I probably would agree 😀

markmccaughrean, to random
@markmccaughrean@mastodon.social avatar

Good grief.

Our Dutch moving company just called to tell us they have to pull our move to Heidelberg a few days forward, because guess what?

May 30 is Corpus Christi / Fronleichnam & public holiday in the southern Catholic states of Germany.

Trucks are not allowed to drive on Sundays & public holidays.

So they need to be unpacked & back in Nordrhein-Westfalen by midnight that day 🙄

I've always hated May in Germany – so many batty religious holidays getting in the way of secular life 😬

hfalcke,
@hfalcke@mastodon.social avatar

@markmccaughrean Take a holiday 😉. I would guess most Germans love the May holidays, because that ist typically the time when you get good spring weather and can enjoy a few off days.

hfalcke,
@hfalcke@mastodon.social avatar

@markmccaughrean Holidays are and import societal glue - destroy them and you will harm society even more. Most are religious in origin.

BTW, religious holidays are protected in general by our constitution.

Also, I don’t see a significant number of Germans that are seriously considering getting rid of the May holidays.

hfalcke,
@hfalcke@mastodon.social avatar

@markmccaughrean @brunthal Well, a country and a culture is not just what some individuals would like to do now, like moving on a holiday, but is also it’s entire history as well, with all it’s good and bad experiences. (And religion shaped our modern society in a major way, including many of the good things).Also, still half of the people are members of churches.

hfalcke, (edited )
@hfalcke@mastodon.social avatar

@markmccaughrean I would also argue, that the uneven distribution is actually very well chosen also from a psychological point of view (though I can’t quote a study). After the long cold and dark days, this is the time where nature awakes, days are getting long and you can enjoy spring. It is now when you need them. In summer you have long vacation periods, then they are actually pointless. Not everybody loves work as much as we do (and I still need holidays!!)

vicgrinberg, to random
@vicgrinberg@mastodon.social avatar

I am trying to re-create an old talk from ~4 years ago I found in my archives and I simultaneously love past-me (she did such a great job developing a talk structure, much better than the one I had in mind when asked to give a talk on this topic a month ago!) and hate her (she somehow managed to deleted the keynote of the talk so that I am now stuck with a PDF and trying to find all figures & re-type the text ...).

hfalcke,
@hfalcke@mastodon.social avatar

@markmccaughrean @vicgrinberg @knud I send an old draft a week in advance and then have a friendly chat with the local technician - they always find a way to make it work

hfalcke,
@hfalcke@mastodon.social avatar

@markmccaughrean @vicgrinberg @knud Well, I still need an adapter to HDMI and for big venues it often doesn’t work for some reason (I have three different ones!). Then you need to transfer to Windows after all and then some movies don’t play. It is not that simple actually (and I am using PPT on Mac) - even if you send slides ahead of time. 🙄

hfalcke,
@hfalcke@mastodon.social avatar

@markmccaughrean @vicgrinberg @knud Fully agreed, but I am not upgrading my Mac every year … and it regained the HDMI port only recently

hfalcke,
@hfalcke@mastodon.social avatar

@markmccaughrean @vicgrinberg @knud Nope. I have the 13inch M2 MacBook - still fairly recent. Just two USB-C ports … 🙄 (it is longstanding Apple dogma to make you carry the weight of your device in adapters)

markmccaughrean, to heidelberg
@markmccaughrean@mastodon.social avatar

If you know, you know 🍺

🏰🇩🇪
📷

hfalcke,
@hfalcke@mastodon.social avatar

@markmccaughrean @knud Tag der Arbeit - essentially for the unions.

franco_vazza, to Astronomy
@franco_vazza@mastodon.social avatar

So I am teaching a master level course in astroparticle physics, which has about 15 students.

One of them consistently shows up, put his head on the desk during the break, and never lift it up for the full second hour.

😴
At least, he does not snore, and he's getting something useful out of my bla about cosmic rays.

Did anything similar happen to someone else? How did you deal with that?

hfalcke,
@hfalcke@mastodon.social avatar

@franco_vazza I have a big introductory course for first year students, that just came out of school. Some don’t pay any attention and I would approach them personally, make a comment and ask them a question or so, at least so they know I know.

hfalcke, to random German
@hfalcke@mastodon.social avatar

Da ist schön 😊. Unser „Kekskrümel im All“ ist auf dem ersten Platz der Hörbuchliste mit netter Besprechung:

“Papa ist »Weltraumforscher« und beantwortet Janas Fragen nach der Größe des Himmels, dem Weltall und wie weit der Mond entfernt ist, kindgerecht und liebevoll. So lernt Jana wie nebenbei das Universum kennen und fühlt sich angesichts dessen Größe wie ein Kekskrümel. Andreas Fröhlich liest humorvoll, empathisch und informativ zugleich. Ein Sachhörbuch erster Klasse”

image/jpeg

macrumors, to random
@macrumors@mastodon.social avatar

Should Apple Kill Siri and Start Over? https://www.macrumors.com/2024/04/18/should-apple-kill-siri/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=mastodon

hfalcke,
@hfalcke@mastodon.social avatar

@macrumors Yes, kill it please. My car is smarter than … really

vicgrinberg, to random
@vicgrinberg@mastodon.social avatar

Now that's a new one... And a level that I never managed to reach on "good old Twitter": Weird emails as replies to a post of mine. And a totally innocent post asking folks for recommendations for reviews for a series 🤷‍♀️

hfalcke,
@hfalcke@mastodon.social avatar

@vicgrinberg You are famous !

hfalcke, to Astro
@hfalcke@mastodon.social avatar

Currently new () observations are happening. This is part of our enthusiastic and international team at the 30m-telescope on Pico Veleta in Spain: Lott Frans (Univ Namibia), Noemia La Bella (@Radboud_uni ) and Pablo Torne (IRAM). Weather on past night was fantastic😊.

Snow-covered mountain slopes with ski lifts at dusk, under a sky with pink clouds. A part of a large, curved architectural structure is visible on the right, which is part of the 30m telescope. © Salvador Sanchez

hfalcke, to Astro
@hfalcke@mastodon.social avatar

Some of the young scientists in the team who led the new Event Horizon Telescope polarization results and their culinary inspiration …. That has become sort of a tradition since some people misinterpreted our ring of fire as an orange donut 🤷🏼‍♂️ Not sure what happened to the color though.

(From left Freek Roelofs, Sara Issaoun and Angelo Ricarte. The first two did their PhD with me. So nice to see how they continue to take leadership in such a big collaboration 😊).

Freek Roelof and Sara Issaoun on the left and Angelo Ricarte in the middle led the analysis
Orange and red swirling pattern representing a black hole's inner accretion flow and jet base.

hfalcke,
@hfalcke@mastodon.social avatar

@vicgrinberg Funny you mention this, but the picture on the left was taken by one of the operators at the IRAM 30m telescope when I was there in 2017 observing for the . (For comparison, the black hole picture on the right was calculated by the Shutterstock collaboration and published in the journal Business Standard - that I just came across by chance🤷🏼‍♂️).

image/jpeg

mcnees, to random
@mcnees@mastodon.social avatar

The Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration has released their latest results, including this image of polarized light from the region surrounding the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy.

https://eventhorizontelescope.org/blog/astronomers-unveil-strong-magnetic-fields-spiraling-edge-milky-way’s-central-black-hole

Image: EHT Collaboration

hfalcke,
@hfalcke@mastodon.social avatar

@mcnees Well, the time estimate how long it would take was off by more than a decade 😬

hfalcke, to Astronomy
@hfalcke@mastodon.social avatar

New!! Observations of our Event Horizon Telescope () collaboration have uncovered strong & organized magnetic fields spiraling around the edge of the supermassive black hole Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*). Images in polarized light of the in the Milky Way center reveal structures similar to those in M87*, suggesting that strong magnetic fields may be common to all black holes. This also hints toward a hidden jet in Sgr A*!

https://www.ru.nl/en/about-us/news/astronomers-unveil-strong-magnetic-fields-spiraling-at-the-edge-of-milky-ways-central-black-hole

Blue oval with a red center line and wavy hairlike structures showing the polarized radio lighter measured by the Planck satellite of the entire sky with the Milky Way prominently along the horizontal center line. Inset toward the center show an inclined ring and two spikes, which are gas streamers in the Galactic Center measured by Sofia (DLR/NASA). Inset to the left shows the polarized ring of the black hole radio image from the EHT again.
Two orange rings with hairy spiral structures. Left: image of black hole in M87, right: black hole Sagittarius A* in the Galactic Center. By Event Horizon Telescope 2024

hfalcke,
@hfalcke@mastodon.social avatar

@franco_vazza @soundasleep apparently it was left out in the last step when it was put online. Should be fixed now! Thx for pointing it out 👍

  • All
  • Subscribed
  • Moderated
  • Favorites
  • •
  • provamag3
  • kavyap
  • DreamBathrooms
  • ethstaker
  • magazineikmin
  • everett
  • InstantRegret
  • Youngstown
  • vwfavf
  • slotface
  • rosin
  • cubers
  • ngwrru68w68
  • PowerRangers
  • Leos
  • thenastyranch
  • Durango
  • cisconetworking
  • khanakhh
  • osvaldo12
  • mdbf
  • modclub
  • GTA5RPClips
  • normalnudes
  • tester
  • tacticalgear
  • anitta
  • megavids
  • All magazines
    •