Michiel B.M. van der Klis

Michiel van der Klis Baldur Maximilliaan ( born June 9, 1953 in The Hague) is a Dutch astrophysicist.

Klis in 1983 received his doctorate at the University of Amsterdam with Ed van den Heuvel on the observation of X-ray binaries. As a post-doctoral researcher at ESTEC in Noordwijk, he was. He became an assistant professor at the University of Amsterdam, where he received a full professor in 1993 1989. He is at the Astronomical Institute Anton Pannekoek University, whose director he was since 2005.

He became a member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Sciences ( KNAW ) and 2003 of the Royal Dutch Society of Sciences ( KHMW ) 2002. In 2010 he received an Academy Chair of the KNAW, which he held until 2015.

He is the discoverer of the first X-ray pulsars with periods in the millisecond range - it rotates at 400 revolutions per second.

He also discovered in 1984 at the EXOSAT research satellites of ESA, the phenomenon quasi-periodic oscillations in the X-ray spectrum of X-ray binaries ( QPO ). The phenomenon was then a very active field of research, because it comes from the inner edge of the accretion disk around compact objects such as black holes or neutron stars and insights into their dynamics and in general relativistic effects allowed.

In 1987 he received the Bruno Rossi Prize and the 2004 Spinoza Prize. In 1990 he received the Zeldovich Medal of COSPAR.