Prof. P.J. Groot (Paul)
Professor - Astrophysics
Heyendaalseweg 135
6525 AJ NIJMEGEN
Internal postal code: 62
Postbus 9010
6500 GL NIJMEGEN
Prof. Paul Groot studies compact binary stars and gravitational wave sources. Compact binaries consist of at least one stellar remnant (a white dwarf, neutron star or black hole), together with either an ordinary star or another stellar remnant. These compact binaries are important for understanding physical phenomena occurring under the influence of extreme gravity, temperatures, pressures and densities. They are also the source population for bursts of gravitational waves, detected with the Advanced Virgo and LIGO detectors on the ground and the future LISA satellite in space.
Paul Groot is co-founder and former head of the Department of Astrophysics at Radboud and former chair of the board of NOVA, the Dutch top research school in astronomy. He is one of the initiators of the European Galactic Plane Surveys project, which is charting the Plane of the Milky Way. He was Project Scientist on the X-Shooter spectrograph, for ESO's Very Large Telescope (VLT).
He is PI on the BlackGEM array of telescope in Chile for the detection of optical counterparts for gravitational wave sources, and the MeerLICHT telescope in South Africa for the simultaneous detection of radio-optical transients in combination with the MeerKAT radio telescope.
Since 2018 Paul Groot divides his time between Radboud University and the University of Cape Town and the South African Astronomical Observatory, where he has an appointment as SARChI Chair in Fast Transients and Gravitational Wave Astronomy.