Ernst Kuiper’s home page
Welcome gentle visitor.
What is this place?
On this website you will find information on me, my research and my PhD thesis.
Who are you?
My name is Ernst Kuiper. That picture that you see on the right... That’s me.
What do you do?
I am a PhD student in Astrophysics at the Leiden Observatory. There I study protoclusters of galaxies in the early Universe under the supervision of George Miley and Huub Röttgering.
Why would you do that?
One of the most important questions in present day astrophysics is how galaxies form and evolve. The environment of the galaxies seems to play a pivotal role in this. When we look at local galaxy clusters we find that they are dominated by red elliptical galaxies that have ceased their star formation. Field environments on the other hand show predominantly blue, star forming, spiral galaxies. Also, the most massive galaxies known, cD galaxies, are exclusively located in the centers of galaxy clusters. The cluster environment has therefore seemingly had an effect on the evolution of its galaxies, but when and how this happens is still unknown.
To understand the role of galaxy clusters in galaxy evolution it would be best to study galaxy clusters across cosmic time, but the further back we go, the more difficult it becomes to find them. Here is where high-z radio galaxies come in. These galaxies are known to be at large redshift, i.e. when the Universe was less than 25% of its age. Also important is that they are very massive with stellar masses of 10¹¹-10¹² Msun. What we think is that massive galaxies form in dense environments. Dense environments may collapse to become galaxy clusters. So, these radio galaxies should be tracers of galaxy cluster progenitors, ‘protoclusters’.
What I do, is that I try to identify these protoclusters, study their dynamical state and investigate whether the properties of the galaxies in the protocluster differ from the properties of galaxies in the field. That way we might learn what actually makes cluster galaxies deviate from field galaxies and when this effect begins to be apparent. Also, it may give important insights in how galaxy clusters actually form. This is very important to understand how our Universe works.
I want to know more
That can be arranged. On this website you will find more information on me and my background here. Also, the preliminary contents of my thesis can be found here. Here you can also find abstracts for my papers and links to the papers that have already been published. Enjoy!
My name is Ernst Kuiper. I did my Master's Thesis in Astronomy at Utrecht University. In 2007, I started my Ph.D. research at Leiden University.
My latest article, The discovery of a high-z protocluster with tunable filters: the case of 6C0140+326 at z=4.4, can be found here.
For more info on me, have a look at my resumé.
You can contact me at kuiper@strw.leidenuniv.nl.