Computational Astrophysics

How does mass transfer occur in interacting binaries? How do magnetic fields affect this process?
What is dark matter? How does it affect large-scale structure formation?
How did the first galaxies and quasars form and evolve? What are the observational signatures of these first luminous objects?
How did the stars and galaxies we know today arise from the initial conditions of the Big Bang, and how did the process of Cosmic Reionization unfold?
What are the properties of the supermassive black holes that power the most distant quasars? How did they form at the cosmic dawn?
What is the relationships between supermassive black holes and host galaxies?
How do supernovae explode?
What is the nature of matter in neutron stars?

Steinn Sigurdsson showed that black holes in dense stellar clusters tend to form segregated sub-clusters and become bound into binaries which then mutually eject each other, leaving most clusters with either zero, one or two black holes, regardless of how many they started with.
Yuexing Li has pioneered the numerical modeling of the formation, evolution, and multi-band properties of the most distant galaxies and quasars by combining multi-scale cosmological simulations with multi-wavelength radiative transfer calculations. She has developed essential models of quasar formation, as well as a comprehensive radiative transfer code ART² ,which has a wide range of applications in modeling both continuum and emission lines from galaxies and quasars.
David Radice has performed large simulation campaigns to model the neutron star mergers GW170817 [1] and GW190425 [2, 3]. Radice's group is also active in the development of new techniques and codes for general-relativistic neutrino-radiation magnetohydrodynamics [4, 5].

Yuexing Li is conducting computational work to investigate the formation of the first quasars, accretion onto black holes, Lyman-alpha emission from high-redshift galaxies, fossils of the first black holes and galaxies in the Milky Way, and large-scale structure formation.
Qirong Zhu and Yuexing Li are studying the co-evolution of massive black holes and host galaxies from cosmic dawn to present day using a set of high-resolution, hydrodynamic cosmological simulations.
Shawn Sinawa and Yuexing Li are modeling the observational signatures of the first quasars for JWST and ALMA, using the 3-D radiative transfer code ART².
Development of next-generation computational relativistic astrophysics simulation infrastructure.
Study of high-energy transients: supernovae, neutron star mergers.

Dept. of Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics