The Arches Cluster

The Arches cluster is a young massive star cluster near the galactic center. It's high stellar density and a very hostile environment make it a very interesting cluster. Understanding it's formation will teach us much about star formation in general.

In my research I study the formation and evolution of the Arches cluster. To do this, I combine stellar (N-body) dynamics, hydrodynamics, stellar evolution and stellar wind, as well as the gravitation potential of the Galactic center.

S-star wind

With Nora Lutzgendorf, we have used my stellar wind code to simulate the winds from the S-stars. We have investigated the accretion onto the Super massive black hole Sag-A*. The next step will be to use this code to investigate the accretion of stellar wind onto intermediate mass black holes, which can help us understand how we can observe these elusive black holes.

Stellar Wind

My main contribution to the AMUSE framework is a module to simulate stellar wind. It includes different modes from a highly detailed 'accelerating' mode to simulate processes close to stars, to a very fast 'heating' mode to simulate entire embedded star clusters. This code is already used in various projects in collaboration with different people.

HLX-1

HLX-1 is a bright periodic X-ray source near a galaxy 95 mega-parsec from earth. It is currently the best candidate to be an intermediate mass black hole. This is interesting because these types of black holes have never been observed.

The current theory to explain the observed signal, is a star on an eccentric orbit around the black hole, experiencing periodic Roche lobe overflow. I use SPH (Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics) simulations to find out more about the orbital evolution of this system.

Amuse

AMUSE (Astrophysical Multipurpose Software Environment) is a software framework that can connect many different simulation codes used in Astrophysics. Developed by Simone Portegies Zwart, Steve McMillan and many others, it makes it very easy to use and combine a wide variety of these codes.

I use AMUSE for all my simulations and also develop new codes and modules, particularly related to Hydrodynamics and stellar wind.