Netherlands Astronomy Conference 2026

The modeling of stars and stellar populations is a key element in our understanding of the Universe, and plays a large role in the scientific exploitation of observations as astronomy moves into the big data era. However, despite the identification of the key processes and fundamental equations that drive stellar evolution almost a century ago, and the broad availability of numerical methods...

We have just passed the 10th anniversary of the first-ever gravitational-wave detection. With more than 150 detections of merging binary black holes (and counting), gravitational-wave observations have entered the ‘population era’. The data already reveal a rich structure in the black hole mass function. However, for the first time, we have now obtained enough detections to begin identifying...

Images are among the most important tools astronomers use to understand the Universe. As machine learning techniques are increasingly used in astronomy, we explore what machines “see” in galaxy images, with a particular focus on galaxy morphology. 

Galaxy morphology provides one of the most direct observational signatures of evolutionary pathways, making its taxonomy a central pursuit in...