Sera Markoff (Associate professor)

"The Netherlands has traditionally been a leader in astronomy, so I was absolutely delighted to come here. What makes it even more interesting is that astroparticle physics has become a research priority area for the FSc research programme. As a result, in association with two other FSc institutes we have recently established Gravitation and Astroparticle Physics Amsterdam (GRAPPA). We can now take on five additional staff to perform new research." 

"In about five years’ time we will be able to use a sub-millimetre radio telescope that uses virtually the whole planet as its baseline. This will enable us to directly measure some things which we can now only model, such as the distortion of spacetime by the spinning Sgr A*. Countless questions remain about the role of the spin, in particular. In fact, we can now only provide qualitative information on this because the measurement errors are too large to be able to derive exact values. So what’s really exciting is that later we’ll be able to test whether the models we have developed are actually correct."