Netherlands Astronomy Conference 2026

Fast radio bursts (FRBs) are among the most mysterious and exciting phenomena in modern astrophysics. These are extremely energetic bursts originating from extragalactic distances, providing unique probes of the intergalactic medium and offering new ways to study the universe at cosmological scales. Despite major progress in recent years, many questions remain open about their origins,...

Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs) are rapidly becoming unparalleled cosmological tools: the dispersion of these millisecond-duration bursts traces the ionised material along the line of sight, while scattering and Faraday rotation encode the turbulence and magnetic field of intervening media. Nowadays, with more than a hundred FRBs localised to their host galaxies at increasing redshifts, they offer a...

Current and planned X-ray telescopes have imaging resolutions on the order of arcseconds or worse, which exceeds the theoretical diffraction limit by four orders of magnitude. By leveraging a compact, single-spacecraft design, X-ray Interferometry (XRI) can achieve an EHT-like spatial resolution of tens of microarcseconds.
This enormous leap in resolution allows for direct imaging of...

Long-period transients (LPTs) were discovered a few years ago as mysterious radio sources that produce bright pulses that repeat on periods of minutes to hours. While they have been suggested to be extremely slow magnetars or white dwarf binaries, conclusively determining their origins has been complicated by their large distances and high extinction, which make follow-up at other wavelengths...

Understanding the Epoch of Reionisation remains one of the pivotal tasks for modern cosmology, and next-generation telescopes such as EUCLID and JWST are opening up the path to the first precision constraints on reionisation derived from the Lyman-alpha damping wing signature imprinted by the foreground neutral intergalactic medium (IGM) on the spectra of high-redshift quasars.

We developed...

Detection of auroral radio emission from exoplanets presents a unique opportunity to directly probe their magnetic fields. By studying the magnetic characteristics of exoplanets, we can better-understand their atmospheric retention, long-term evolution, and ultimately their habitability. However, an unambiguous detection remains elusive, largely due to limited sensitivity at low radio...