In conversation with Frits Sweijen (PhD student on the LOFAR team)

BONUS VIDEO! This month saw a huge data release from the LOw Frequency ARray (LOFAR), a radio telescope with antennae across Europe. It has revealed the "burps" from growing supermassive black holes (i.e. jets from quasars) in 20x more detail than ever seen before! As part of my video covering that data release, I chatted to PhD Student Frits Sweijen, from Leiden Observatory who is using the LOFAR data to study high redshift radio sources.

My previous video all about the LOFAR data release:    • Incredibly detailed black hole jet im...  
My video interviewing Dr. Leah Morabito:    • In conversation with Dr Leah Morabito...  
My video interviewing PhD student Shruti Badole:    • In conversation with Shruti Badole (P...  

More information about LOFAR: https://www.astron.nl/most-detailed-e...
More about Frits Sweijen: https://home.strw.leidenuniv.nl/~swei...

Links to all papers in the data release: https://www.astron.nl/wp-content/uplo...

Morabito et al. (2021; LOFAR data release and pipeline) - https://arxiv.org/pdf/2108.07283.pdf
Badole et al. (2021; gravitationally lensed quasars) - https://arxiv.org/pdf/2108.07293.pdf
Sweijen et al. (2021; 4C 43.15 high redshift source) - https://arxiv.org/pdf/2108.07290.pdf

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👩🏽‍💻 I'm Dr. Becky Smethurst, an astrophysicist at the University of Oxford. I love making videos about science with an unnatural level of enthusiasm. I like to focus on how we know things, not just what we know. And especially, the things we still don't know. If you've ever wondered about something in space and couldn't find an answer online - you can ask me! My day job is to do research into how supermassive black holes can affect the galaxies that they live in. In particular, I look at what processes can feed growing black holes and whether the energy output from the disk of material orbiting around a growing supermassive black hole can stop a galaxy from forming stars.

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