Netherlands Astronomy Conference 2026

iDaVIE (immersive Data Visualisation Interactive Explorer) is a software tool developed at IDIA (Institute for Data Intensive Astronomy) in Cape Town (https://idavie.readthedocs.io/en/v1.1/). It allows viewing, manipulation and analysis of 3D data in a Virtual Reality setting where one is immersed in the 3D data environment.

There are two versions of iDaVIE. iDAVIE-v allows viewing of 3D...

The outflows of massive stars significantly affect their stellar evolution and surroundings. The mass-loss rates of these stars is thus essential to constrain from their stellar spectra. However, this requires the detailed spectroscopic analysis of large samples of stars. Precisely modelling the wind and atmospheres of massive stars is computationally very expensive, which severely limits the...

We present a new method for fast inference of pulsar emission and interstellar medium (ISM) parameters directly from frequency-resolved pulse profiles. Accurate parameter estimation is challenging due to strong degeneracies, and classical Bayesian likelihood-based fitting becomes computationally expensive for high-dimensional parameter spaces.

We build a physically motivated simulator that...

With the boom of applications of deep neural networks in (astronomical) research, we have grown an urgent need to crack open our own black boxes, lest our reviewers start asking us difficult questions we cannot answer. Enter the field of "explainable AI" (XAI), in which methods to solve this issue are developed and studied. I will give a short introduction into XAI in general, and present our...