Postdoctoral position in Neutron Star Astrophysics

We welcome applications for a 3-year postdoctoral position to work on neutron star astrophysics with Prof. Anna Watts and her group at the Anton Pannekoek Institute for Astronomy (API) at the University of Amsterdam (UvA). The successful applicant will join the ERC Consolidator Grant funded project AEONS (Advancing the Equation of state Of Neutron Stars).

NASA’s NICER X-ray telescope has recently delivered its first measurements of neutron star mass and radius – key probes of the dense matter Equation of State (EOS) – using the new technique of Pulse Profile Modeling (PPM). PPM combines astrophysical modeling, relativistic ray-tracing, and Bayesian inference using high performance computers to deliver not only mass and radius but also a map of the hot emitting regions on the stellar surface. Our group played a major role in this effort, and the AEONS team will continue this work, analyzing new NICER data and carrying out simulations to address the complexities that we have encountered. AEONS also looks ahead to the next generation of large-area X-ray timing telescopes. Missions such as eXTP and STROBE-X are targeting accreting neutron stars for PPM – but these pose challenges such as variability, surface pattern uncertainty, and the need to consider X-ray polarimetry data. AEONS will tackle these issues, and study how to embed PPM in a multi-messenger EOS inference framework with radio and gravitational wave constraints. If you have a background in electromagnetic / gravitational wave neutron star astrophysics, dense matter physics, astrostatistics or computational astrophysics we encourage you to apply.