A Rolling Programme of Astrophysical Research at Leeds

Gas and dust clouds across the galaxy are collapsing into new stars, and a team at Leeds is building computer simulations to track exactly how that happens. The problem is that star formation, the behaviour of matter around black holes, and the glowing nebulae around dead stars all involve the same messy interplay of gas flows, magnetic fields, and chemical reactions. Existing models struggle to capture these interactions at the scales that matter—from the vast sweep of a galactic disc down to the turbulent eddies around a single newborn star. The Leeds group will develop new numerical methods using adaptive grids, which automatically focus computing power on the most complex regions of a simulation, to model these processes more realistically. This is fundamental science. There is no immediate practical application for understanding how a massive star forms or how a pulsar’s magnetic field behaves. But the numerical techniques developed here—particularly the adaptive grid methods—could eventually find uses in other fields that model complex fluid dynamics, such as weather forecasting or aerospace engineering. More directly, the work will sharpen our picture of how galaxies evolve and where the elements that make up planets and people actually come from.