Astron/Kapteyn student Nika Jurlin defends her thesis

© ASTRON

On 13 September 2022, Nika Jurlin successfully defended her thesis entitled 'Timing the cycle of life and death of radio galaxies using LOFAR' at the University of Groningen.

Nika's PhD was a shared ASTRON/Kapteyn Institute project.

For her PhD project, Nika was supervised by Raffaella Morganti (with Peter Barthel as co-promotor) and Marisa Brienza - one of the past ASTRON/Kapteyn PhD students - provided extra support and guidance.

Nika has made use of the unique capabilities of LOFAR for selecting radio galaxies in an elusive phase of their life: dying sources and restarted ones (where the activity has started again after a period of "death"). The new approach used in Nika's work has revealed how their properties can span a wider range than so far considered.

Only by knowing the actual occurrence of these objects, we can time their cycle of life. This is important in order to quantify their impact on the evolution of the host galaxy.

The pdf of Nika's thesis can be found here https://research.rug.nl/en/publications/timing-the-cycle-of-life-and-death-of-radio-galaxies-using-lofar

but if you would like a paper copy, please ask!

Nika has now started a postDoc in Austin (Texas) where she will continue the radio work, but hopefully she will also expand her expertise to optical wavelengths making use of their telescopes.

Congratulations Nika! Good luck with your new position and we wish you many more exciting results!