This is a computation time proposal for 5,000,000 (five-million) CPU-hours on Cartesius supercomputer. The research in this project is in the research area of astrophysics and more specifically with the physical processes around very massive objects such as black holes and neutron stars. Computer simulations of gas in a so-called plasma state are being conducted to investigate the transformation of energy from strong magnetic fields to the plasma.

Extremes in the Universe, such as black holes (BHs) and strongly-curved spacetimes, are key areas for astrophysics this century. Within this context, a defining question is the formation of BHs themselves. The birth of black holes (BHs) provides unique astrophysical conditions where extreme gravity, densities and magnetic fields come together. This proposal aims at directly measuring these extreme astrophysical processes by tracking the mergers of pairs of neutron stars (NSs) or a NS-BH that ultimately form BHs. Although rare and short-lived, NS mergers produce copious amounts of electromagnetic (EM) and gravitational wave (GW) radiation within short timescales. Our goal is to measure, for the first time, the physics driving the mergers through observations of their EM and GW radiation. It leverages the opportunity today to observe these events thanks to new time-domain telescopes and GW detectors (LIGO and Virgo). GW observations will measure the fundamental parameters of NS and BHs, such as their masses, spins and equation of state. EM observations, sensitive to the composition and thermodynamic state of matter, will be complementary to the GW signals that constrain the NS and BH masses and spins. My objectives are to: i) interpret combined EM and GW measurements, and hence ii) determine the astrophysics driving the NS/BH mergers leading to the BH formation. To achieve them, I have designed a multi-disciplinary program, bridging time-domain astronomy, general relativity and statistical and computational astrophysics. I will provide a real-time software necessary to characterise the first EM and GW mergers. We will work in close collaboration with the LIGO-Virgo detectors, the iPTF/ZTF and BlackGEM optical telescopes and radio MEERKAT and LOFAR observatories, to apply the new tools and directly witness the first BH births within the next five years.

With a team of deaf and hearing researchers, Dr. Victoria Nyst, Leiden University Centre for Linguistics, will compare the gesturing of hearing speakers with the sign languages that emerged in villages with a high incidence of deafness in West Africa, to establish whether grammatical differences in sign languages can be traced to cross-cultural differences in gesture.

The delicate relationship between religion and secular modernity is an exemplary element of 21st century societies: of their social and cultural ‘super-diversity’ caused by globalization. The many encounters and confrontations within and between groups and individuals refer to what has been coined as their social imaginaries. These are shared implicit sets of assumptions, often involving moral or religious claims about the society one is part of: claims about the values of society and about how it should be organized. Social imaginaries do not refer to explicit doctrines or beliefs but to the concrete and contingent way communities imagine their background assumptions and ideals. Hence, social imaginaries are ‘lived spaces’ in which people share as well as contest the meaning of their existence. The central research question of the project is: What can the concept of social imaginaries contribute to the analysis - in current cultural theory, religious studies and globalization theory - of societies that are interculturally super-diverse and display complex blends of existential frameworks, with both secular and religious features? Starting from this question the project will develop its research along theoretical and empirical lines, focusing on social imaginaries in urban and in virtual environments against the background of globalization. SIMAGINE will develop an international research consortium of ten relevant partners forming an interdisciplinary network, that aims for joint research and academic as well as public interventions and publications, for the organization of seminars and symposia, and for a larger fully elaborated application in 2019.

“Documenting Africans in Trans-Atlantic Slavery (DATAS)” (www.datasproject.org) develops an innovative method to explore African ethnonyms from the era of trans-Atlantic slavery, circa 1500-1867. Ethnonyms index African identities, places and historical events to reconstruct African culture that is linked to a history of slavery, colonialism and racism. The project centres on the need to understand the origins and trajectories of people of African descent who populated the trans-Atlantic world in the modern era. The development of a method for analysing demographic change and confronting social inequalities arising from racism constitutes a social innovation. The team’s methodology implements a research tool developed in Canada for handling ethnonyms that can be applied in a trans-Atlantic context from France and the United Kingdom to Brazil, the Caribbean and Africa. This innovation confronts methodological problems that researchers encounter in reconstructing the emergence of the African diaspora. A methodology for data justice is salient because ethnonym decision-making used in our digital platform, requires a reconceptualization of the classification systems concerning West Africans. This methodology depends on an open source relational database that addresses important decisions that researchers face in the field about how to develop best practices and a controlled vocabulary for four reasons. First, scholarly expertise on West Africans is scattered globally. Second, the slave trade was transnational, rarely limited to one country or population, and the transfer of Africans across borders reflects this global relationship between colonial and colonized. Third, DATAS makes available a vast amount of information of immense value to marginalized communities deprived of information on their own history. Fourth, the trans-Atlantic and trans-national nature of this project complements the aims of a platform predicated on global collaboration. The project treats ethnonyms as decision making tools as a method whose concepts require rethinking entrenched assumptions about demography, data justice and research transparency.