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Bolton Lecture in Astronomy ‘A Turbulent Tale of Stellar Birth’

Date
Date
Wednesday 4 November 2015

Dense interstellar molecular clouds are many, many times more tenuous than the best laboratory vacuums. However, the clouds are so big that they cause self-generated gravitational fields and collapse, over about 100 thousand years. This process converts two solar masses of gas and dust into stars in our Galaxy every year. Many of the new stars are initially surrounded by disks, in which Earth-like and Jupiter-like planets form in about 10 million years.

The birth of a star with a planetary system is a complex process, involving the non-linear inter-play of gravity, hydrodynamics or magneto-hydrodynamics, radiation, and the chemistry of gas and dust. I will show how powerful supercomputers are used to perform three-dimensional simulations to advance our understanding of this complex process and of the most important parameters governing it.

Professor Walch is a leading computational astrophysical fluid dynamicist with a particular interest in the multifaceted process giving rise to stellar birth and planetary systems. Professor Walch was appointed as a Professor of Theoretical Astrophysics at the University of Cologne, Germany, in 2013. Prior to this she worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the Max-Planck-Institute for Astrophysics in Garching, Germany, and at Cardiff University. She has a PhD in Physics from the Ludwig-Maximilians-University in Munich (2008).

A free public lecture but seats need to be pre-booked here