28 April 2020
Dr Nathalie Degenaar of the Anton Pannekoek Institute, has been awarded an NWO XS grant for the maximum amount of 50.000 euros. She will use the money to investigate if jets from neutron are destructed by thermonuclear explosions and subsequently rebuilt.
The XS grants are meant for high risk/high gain experiments. The grants are divided over all fields and very competitive: This round there were approximately 140 proposals of which 16 were funded.
Degenaar will work together with PhD candidate Jakob van den Eijnden to study if jets on neutron stars are broken down by thermonuclear explosions. Neutron stars are small objects with a diameter of around 20 km that spit out gas and energy into space over distances of trillions of kilometers with jet streams nearing the speed of light. How these jets are formed, broken down and recovered is still not understood very well.