Netherlands Astronomy Conference 2025

Active galactic nuclei (AGNs) play a crucial role in the coevolution of supermassive black holes (SMBHs) and their host galaxies from high redshift to the present. They influence their host galaxies through powerful winds and jets that generate massive outflows, and these feedback processes can either quench star formation by heating and expelling gas or trigger it by compressing the...

Dwarf galaxies play an important role when studying the effects of the environment on galaxy formation and evolution. The Fornax cluster, having a dense core and strong tidal fields, offers an ideal laboratory for investigating the influence of the cluster environment on the morphology of dwarf galaxies. We explore the relationship between the morphology of galaxies, in particular the...

It remains an unanswered question what dictates the amount of dust in the interstellar medium. Asymptotic giant branch stars and supernovae produce dust in their cold atmospheres, but dust gets destroyed during star-formation and supernova shockwaves. The timescales for these effects combined with the observed dust masses in galaxies implies that dust also grows in the interstellar...

Understanding the stellar mass build-up and evolution of the surprisingly massive galaxies in the Epoch of Reionization (EoR) requires insight into their molecular gas reservoirs, which fuel star formation. I will present new deep VLA observations of REBELS-25 (z = 7.31), a massive star-forming galaxy and the highest-redshift dynamically cold disk (V_rot,max/σ ≃ 11) confirmed to date. Using...

This talk introduces ShadowSWIFT, a novel moving-mesh hydrodynamical code for large-scale cosmological and galaxy simulations, developed within the SWIFT collaboration. SWIFT is a highly optimised and scalable software that allows hydrodynamical solvers to use multiple subgrid routines. ShadowSWIFT is currently compatible with the EAGLE and GEAR subgrid routines, and is expected to release...

Numerous theoretical studies within the modern cosmological framework suggest that gas accretion from the intergalactic medium is essential to feed star formation in galaxies throughout cosmic time. However, the way gas accretion takes place is still poorly understood as a direct evidence of it is still lacking. In some models, gas accretion is expected to take place in the outer discs of...

In this talk, I will introduce the Resolved Cluster Evolution Sunyaev-Zeldovich Survey (ReCESS): a 200-hour-plus observing campaign aimed at resolving the intracluster medium (ICM) through the thermal Sunyaev-Zeldovich (tSZ) effect in 25 ACT-selected galaxy clusters within a redshift range of 1.2 < z <2.0 using MUSTANG-2 on the GBT and ALMA. I will present the first results on the average...

Mass and angular momentum regulate most of their formation and evolution of galaxies, including their morphological, kinematic, and star-forming properties.

In this talk, I will present our recent results characterising the angular momentum of the molecular gas in nearby disc galaxies. Exploiting data from the PHANGS-ALMA survey, we have performed the first statistical study of the...

We present two new radio continuum images obtained with Apertif at 1.4 GHz. The images, produced with a direction-dependent
calibration pipeline, cover 136 square degrees of the Lockman Hole and 24 square degrees of the ELAIS-N fields, with an average
resolution of 17×12′′ and residual noise of 33 μJy/beam. With the improved depth of the images we found in total 63692 radio
sources, many of...

Ram pressure stripping, i.e. the advection of the interstellar medium (ISM) of galaxies experiencing a intracluster medium (ICM) wind, is a key process responsible for the environmental quenching of star-formation activity in galaxy clusters. This process also affects the non-thermal component of the ISM, i.e. the magnetic fields and cosmic rays, which can be probed in the radio continuum. In...

The interplay between gas accretion, feedback, and galactic dynamics plays a crucial role in shaping galaxy evolution. The MHONGOOSE survey, with its unprecedented HI sensitivity and high spatial resolution, provides a transformative opportunity to study these complex processes in nearby galaxies. By probing gas at extremely low column densities in the outskirts of galaxies, MHONGOOSE enables...

The cosmic star-forming activity peaked at redshifts z=1-4 in the so-called "Cosmic Noon". This vigorous star production is driven by massive galaxies with star-formation rates 100-1000x higher than the Milky Way. However, it has long been unclear what causes these immense star formation: were early galaxies forming stars very efficiently, or are they simply more gas-rich than present-day...

Most Active Galactic Nuclei (AGNs) are thought to contain a molecular and dusty torus that surrounds the accretion disk and obscures the AGN. The high angular resolution of the Atacama Large Millimetre/submillimetre Array (ALMA) allows us to resolve these tori for the first time, opening up the road to answering some long-held questions. One such question is the dynamics of tori and their...

If a system comes very close to a massive black hole it will be disrupted. The rate and type of these disruptions depends on the mechanism by which such a close passage occurs. We present new results showing that the axisymmetry of the potential of a galaxy (using the Milky way as an example) allows for chaotic orbits, a substantial fraction of which can dive arbitrarily close to the galactic...