Is there extra-terrestrial life out there? It now looks as though we can sketch out an answer to this enduring question. Leiden Observatory is helping to build new instruments to find the most promising exoplanets.

A team of astronomers led by Dutch scientists have directly imaged a giant planet orbiting at a large distance around a sun-like star. Why this planet is so massive, and how it got to be there, is still a mystery. The researchers will publish their findings in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.

By effectively integrating word-class scientific research and excellent business education, you will become a professional astronomer with an internationally recognized MSc degree prepared for technological business challenges.

By effectively integrating word-class scientific research and excellent education, you will become a professional astronomer with an internationally recognized degree.

By effectively integrating word-class scientific research and excellent education, you will become a professional astronomer with an internationally recognized degree.

By integrating world-class scientific research and education, you will become a professional physicist with an internationally recognized degree.

The two-year Astronomy and High-Tech Innovation master’s specialisation places you at the heart of the latest astronomical discoveries, cutting-edge instrumentation, high-precision measurements, and innovative technologies in advanced instrumentation engineering. The programme is supported by researchers…

By effectively integrating word-class scientific research and excellent education, you will become a professional astronomer with an internationally recognized degree.

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 thousands of years bloodlines have been held as virtually unassailable credentials for leadership, with supreme political power perceived as a family affair across the globe and throughout history. At the heart of royal dynasties, kings were inflated to superhuman proportions, yet their status came…

The METIS instrument that’s being built for ESO's future Extremely Large Telescope (ELT) in Northern Chile under the leadership of the Dutch Research School for Astronomy (NOVA) has reached an important milestone: the preliminary design has been approved.

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.

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…

Promotor: S.M. Verduyn Lunel

This research focuses on the distribution of chemical elements in protoplanetary disks, the birthplaces of planets. These disks form around young stars and contain gas and dust, from which planets grow. Ice plays a crucial role in planet formation, aiding the clumping of dust particles and influencing…

In this thesis I highlight the applications of Oxford Nanopore Technologies (ONT) sequencing. This technique is a relatively new approach in the sequencing field, where nanopores are embedded in a membrane, DNA molecules are pulled through nanopores and an electrical current serving as the sequencing…

In this thesis, I study the formation of large-scale structure and the physics of particle acceleration at large scales (~Mpc).

This thesis focuses on data found in the field of computational drug discovery. New insight can be obtained by applying machine learning in various ways and in a variety of domains. Two studies delved into the application of proteochemometrics (PCM), a machine learning technique that can be used to…

Foundation for Industry (FIND) brings together 5 universities with 10 labs, 11 Dutch companies, ranging from start-ups to multinationals, and 2 knowledge institutes to pave the way for a new wave of AI-based automation that helps the Dutch industry strengthen and keep its international competitive advantage…

By effectively integrating world-class scientific research and excellent education, you will become a professional astronomer with an internationally recognized degree.

Astronomers have discovered seven Earth-like planets around a dwarf star in our galaxy. Three of these planets are located in the habitable zone of this star, and may contain liquid water. ‘The next step is to study the atmospheres for signs of life. In Leiden we are experts in that area,‘ says planetary…

ChEMBL is a large-scale drug discovery database containing bioactivity information primarily extracted from scientific literature.

The Leiden Observatory is starting a crowdfunding campaign to raise enough money to construct a new telescope.

Nowadays, it is well known that hydrogen and helium (and small traces of lithium and beryllium) were created shortly after the Big Bang, while the heavier elements are created in the cores of stars at different evolutionary stages. When these stars explode as supernovae, they expel metals synthesised…

An international team of astronomers, including Leiden’s Christian Ginski, has discovered previously unobserved structures in a debris disk around a nearby star. Article published in Nature on 8 October.

This thesis is divided into two parts. In Part I we study metastability properties of queue-based random-access protocols for wireless networks. The network is modeledas a bipartite graph whose edges represent interference constraints. In Part II we study spectra of inhomogeneous Erdős-Rényi random…

This thesis is a (biased) journey through very different topics in astrophysics: quasars and new populations of active galactic nuclei, gravitational waves from merging black holes, and protoplanetary discs around young stars.

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.

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?

An international team of astronomers led by researchers from the Leiden University has discovered a whirlwind of dust and pebbles in orbit around a young star. It is possible that a planet is forming in the pebbles. The team of scientists made the discovery during the time that designers and developers…

The Werkgroep Leidse Sterrewacht (WLS) is an amateur association that, in addition to organising public activities, is also heavily involved in maintaining the historical telescopes in the Old Observatory.

Astrophysicist Ewine van Dishoeck has been awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of Geneva. She received the award on 11 October during the Dies academicus of the Swiss university, which, like Leiden University, is part of the European research university federation LERU.

HomininSpace is an agent based modelling and simulation system in which fluctuating carrying capacity is the key attractor for hominin dispersal. A parameterized and spatially explicit reconstructed palaeo-environment models available energy in the form of secondary biomass using reconstructed climate…

Promotor: Prof.dr. T. Hankemeier, Prof.dr. J.C.T. Eijkel (Twente University)

Why do black holes emit thermal radiation? And how does a closed quantum system thermalize?

Latest technological developments in data mining and profiling.

The LOFAR radio telescope produces petabytes of data every year. Radio Astronomers use complex multi-step pipelines to process this data and produce scientific images.

An international team of astronomers have become the first in the world to detect isotopes in the atmosphere of an exoplanet. It concerns different forms of carbon in the gaseous giant planet TYC 8998-760-1 b. The research will be published in the scientific journal Nature on Thursday.

Celebrating 20 years of Environmental Research and Education in Northern Cameroon

Large telescopes can look so deep into the Universe that they can also look back billions of years in time. From 2018, the successor of the Hubble Space Telescope, the James Webb Space Telescope, will be able to see the period just after the Big Bang, when the first stars and galaxies formed. Astronomers…

Astronomers want to understand the Universe, from the Big Bang to the present day, and what the future will hold. In Leiden they focus on two key questions: ‘How did stars and planets originate’ and ‘How were galaxies and black holes formed in the young Universe?’ A new generation of telescopes – just…