Daegene Koh Wins Poster Prize at First Stars V!
Graduate student, Daegene Koh, won first place in the popular vote for best poster (out of 75) at the conference, First Stars V. Congratulations! By winning best poster, he got to give a 10-minute presentation on his work. Pretty good for a first conference!
Solar Superstorms Video
During my visit to the NSF and US Senate, I was interviewed by the NSF for an educational video on solar storms and their effects. Take a look!
In a flash, all of your electronics could be gone, courtesy of a solar storm. However, a … Continue Reading ›› New Paper: Early X-ray Background
About a month ago, we submitted a new paper on the build-up of the X-ray radiation background. Here we used the Renaissance Simulations to estimate the number density of high-mass X-ray binaries from the first metal-free (Population III) stars. We found that these binaries produce about 6 eV of energy in the X-rays per … Continue Reading ››New Paper: Early Magnetic Field Amplification
My graduate student, Daegene Koh, submitted his first paper to MNRAS two months ago, titled "Amplification of Magnetic Fields in a Primordial HII Region and Supernova". Late last week, we resubmitted the paper after making revisions after a favorable referee report, and posted it on arXiv today. Here we run a suite of … Continue Reading ››Presentation at the US Senate
On May 25th, I joined a group of people involved with the planetarium show Solar Superstorms to discuss impacts of space weather on Earth and the importance of computational science and visualization. This event was organized by the NSF in support for a bill on space weather monitoring sponsored by Sen. Bill Peters (D-MI). It … Continue Reading ››New Paper: First Galaxy Properties and Reionization
Yesterday, we submitted a new paper (arXiv) focusing on the physical properties of the first generations of galaxies in the universe and their role during cosmic reionization. This effort was led by Hao Xu at UC - San Diego. We analyzed all of the metal-enriched galaxies in the Renaissance Simulations in three … Continue Reading ››Congratulations Austin and Collin!
Two of my undergraduate researchers have secured positions that will further their careers.
- Collin Cunningham, an applied math major, is graduating this semester, and he will be going to the Technical University of Denmark to receive his Masters in mathematical modeling. He has been working on increasing the accuracy of the ray tracing module … Continue Reading ››
New Paper: Late Primordial Star Formation
Last week, our paper (arXiv) on the late formation of metal-free (Population III) massive stars was accepted to the Astrophysical Journal. It was led by Hao Xu at UC - San Diego. We used a suite of high-resolution simulations, named the Renaissance Simulations, that focuses on the formation of these primordial stars … Continue Reading ››New Paper: Effects of X-rays on BH Formation
On Wednesday, we submitted a new paper (arXiv), led by John Regan at Durham University, focusing on the formation of a massive black hole at very high redshifts, which are potential seeds for supermassive BHs observed at redshift 6 that have masses around 1 billion solar masses. Here we utilized radiation hydrodynamics simulations … Continue Reading ››Simulating the Universe
