Recent Highlights from the VERITAS AGN Program VERITAS is one of the world’s most sensitive detectors of astrophysical very high energy (VHE; E > 100 GeV) gamma rays. This observatory began full-scale operations in 2007, and more than 8,000 hours of its good-weather observations have been targeted on active galactic...

Improving our understanding of machine learning robustness - in microscopy and beyond A central goal when applying machine learning in the biomedical research and medical imaging is to answer relevant interdisciplinary questions robustly and reliably across various setups and ideally modalities; however, this is challenged by different imaging systems, differences...

Muon Hunting with the Crowd: Combining Humans and Machines to Solve Big Data Problems In this presentation, I will describe the Zooniverse.org citizen science platform as a tool to gather labels from over 2.7 million dedicated volunteers worldwide who are motivated to participate in scientific research. Hundreds of research teams...

Thermal X-ray emission from supernova remnants in 3D (M)HD simulations Every supernova (SN) injects around 10^51 ergs into the interstellar medium (ISM), shaping the ISM’s chemical, thermal, and dynamic evolution. Around 70% of the injected energy is subsequently lost by radiative cooling. However, the fate of the emitted cooling photons...

Signal reconstruction for fields using probabilistic forward modeling Many inference tasks in observational astronomy take the form of reconstruction problems where the underlying quantities of interest are fields (functions of space, time and/or frequency) that have to be recovered from noisy and incomplete observational data. These problems are in general...

Rotation-powered pulsars and their nebulae – the eROSITA view SRG/eROSITA is a soft X-ray (0.2 - 10 keV) telescope which has carried out the deepest X-ray all-sky survey to date. In this talk, I will present how the eROSITA data can be used to study rotation-powered pulsars and their pulsar...

Intricacies of searching for supernova remnants at (very) high energies off the Galactic plane Supernova remnants (SNRs) have traditionally been considered prime candidates for the acceleration of particles to high energies and to thus significantly contribute to the Galactic cosmic ray (CR) density. Most of them are first seen at...

Black hole evaporation and quantum gravity Hawking's seminal result, that black holes behave as black bodies with a non-vanishing temperature, suggests that black holes should evaporate. However, Hawking's derivation is incomplete as it neglects the backreaction between radiation and geometry. Including it requires to incorporate quantum gravity. This talk focuses...

Satellite Constellations & Astronomy: What is the problem? What are we doing about it? In recent years, large satellite constellations have been launched into low-Earth orbit to provide low-latency, global communication coverage. As a result, the number of satellites in orbit has surged from approximately 2,500 to over 10,000, raising...

Optical spectroscopy and imaging of blazars for the Cherenkov Telescope Array Observatory Blazars are the brightest persistent sources in the high-energy and very-high-energy (VHE) gamma-ray sky. Because their UV/optical radiation is often dominated by non-thermal, and, in the case of BL Lacs, featureless continuum radiation, the determination of their redshift...