Prof.dr. Simon Portegies Zwart

Name: Prof.dr. Simon Portegies Zwart

Affiliation: Sterrewacht Leiden, Leiden University

Biography: Simon Portegies Zwart is professor of computational astrophysics at the Sterrewacht Leiden in the Netherlands. His principal scientific interests are high-performance computational astrophysics. This includes parallel algorithms and numerical integration techniques, but also multi-scale and multi-physics modelling, the evolution of hierarchical stellar and planetary systems, and the ecology of dense star clusters. He is editor in chief of the open access journal "Computational Astrophysics and Cosmology" and visiting researcher of the Particle Simulator Team at RIKEN.  In his free time, he brews beer and translates Egyptian hieroglyphs.

Title of talk:The collision between the Andromeda and Milky Way galaxies

Abstract: We will demonstrate how two galaxies interact and collide using the Little Green Machine running the Bonsai gravitational treecode. This interaction can only be solved by integrating the equations of motion of a large number of stars to sufficiently high precision. With the Little green Machine we can perform such simulations in Leiden, rather than that we have to go to a foreign supercomputer.

Foto: Prof S. Portegies Zwart (sitting) and dr. J Bedorf (standing)  working on the new Little Green Machine.

Foto: LGM with the results of a calculation of a merger between the Milky Way and the Andromeda galaxies on the screen.