March 2023 – Ondřej Pejcha

A theory of mass transfer in binary stars

In his first astronomy paper, PhD student Jakub Cehula looks at how is mass transfer in binary stars calculated in 1D stellar evolution codes. These codes work and produce binary evolutionary tracks so why look at this?

Master thesis defended

Congratulations to David Vokrouhlický who defended his Master thesis on Structure and evolution of stars deformed by a nearby companion with flying colors.

Contact discontinuity model of Shu et al. (1976).

Departing postdoc

Diego Calderón is leaving us after a bit more than 3 years in Prague. Diego is moving to start his second postdoc in Hamburg in the group of Prof. Rosswog. We are sad to see him go, but wish him good luck!

About

We are interested in connecting theory, observations, and data modelling of time-domain phenomena in astronomy. This includes transients such as stellar mergers and core-collapse supernovae, persistent variable sources such as eclipsing binaries and pulsating stars, and stellar dynamics. We do (radiation)(magneto)hydrodynamics on supercomputers, semi-analytic models, and machine learning of astronomical data. Come meet us at Science coffee every Tuesday and Thursday at 2.30pm in KVAS room at ITP.

We are supported by the ERC Starting grant Cat-In-hAT to develop new computational methods to study binary star mergers, common envelope, and the associated transients. We are also support by Czech Science Foundation to study mass transfer in binaries. In the past, we received Czech-American collaboration grant from the Czech Ministry of Education, Youth, and Sports to participate in the ASAS-SN survey and the Primus award PRIMUS/SCI/17 from the Charles University.