PhD research: Interstellar dust studied through X-rays.
Interstellar dust plays an important role in the processes that drive the evolution of the Interstellar Medium. The X-rays provide us with important advantages to study this dust.
By using Chandra X-ray satellite data of X-ray binaries (and in the future of Astro-H) we can study the chemical composition of the dust in dense environments.
My research is done under the supervision of Dr. Elisa Costantini, professor Xander Tielens and Dr. Cor de Vries. The research is carried out at SRON and Leiden Observatory.
Besides interstellar dust, I take an interest in debris disks, planet formation and exoplanets. During my Major master project at Leiden Observatory I studied the Fomalhaut debris
disk and calculated whether it is possible to observe collisions between planetesimals in the disk. The paper about this project was published in February 2014 and can be read
here.
Other projects:
- In 2011 I worked on my Minor master research project under the supervision of Dr. Henk Hoekstra. The project is titled:
'Model of weak gravitational lensing in galaxy clusters'. You can read the article here.
- During my bachelor I worked on a six month project titled: 'The gas content variation in the mass-metallicity relation'.
I did this project under supervision of Dr. Jarle Brinchmann in 2009.