Selma E. de Mink

Time for an update with all new faces of our cross Atlantic group. In (crimson) red all those that are Harvard based and in orange all those that are in Amsterdam.

Ylva Götberg’s third thesis paper has accepted for publication A&A. In this paper, we present predictions for the integrated spectra of stellar populations including the hard ionizing photons expected from hot stars that have lost their envelope through interaction with a binary companion. The SED’s will be made available through the STARBURST99 portal. https://arxiv.org/abs/1908.06102

August 1, 2019, I started at Harvard University. I keep being affiliated with the University of Amsterdam. Incredibly excited to start a new (transatlantic) group.

Manos Zapartas is a very recent BinCosmos PhD graduate, who only left our group a few months ago for Geneva observatory. We are very excited to share that he has been awarded the competitive Swiss Government Excellence Fellowship. This allows him to pursue his research on the final fate of massive binary stars. He will do so as a member of the group of dr. Tassos Fragos, who recently joined Geneva Observatories last year as an assistant professor.

Group member Athira Menon, postdoc in the BinCosmos group, won the Dutch final of FameLab on 9 May. FameLab is a pitch competition for young researchers, in which they have only three minutes to explain their research to the general public.  By winning the national final, she won a trip to Cheltenham, England, to compete at the annual Cheltenham Science Festival (June 4-9) against 24 other FameLab winners from around the world.

De Mink is one of the ten new members of the Dutch National Young academy of sciences, installed March 21, 2019. The Academy unites Dutch talented scientists across all academic disciplines that obtained their Ph.D. less than ten years ago. In addition to having an outstanding track record, they share a strong interest in science policy and science communication. Membership is for five years. Read about the profiles of the ten new members here.

On Feb. 7, 2019, Ylva Götberg successfully defended her thesis on the properties and impact of stripped stars. She is continuing her research as a Alvin E. Nashman Postdoctoral Fellow in Theoretical Astrophysics at Carnegie Observatories in Pasadena, CA. Find more about her work at her new website.

Anticipating new gravitational wave detections of heavy binary black holes, Pablo Marchant (CIERA) together with Bincosmos group members Mathieu Renzo and Rob Farmer’s explore the effects of pulsations experienced by the most massive stars. Find a preview here.

“Pulsational pair-instability supernovae in very close binaries” by Pablo Marchant, Mathieu Renzo,Robert Farmer, Kaliroe M. W. Pappas, Ronald E. Taam, Selma de Mink, and Vassiliki Kalogera.

Mathieu Renzo’s investigation of what is probably the most massive runaway star currently known. Using Gaia and Hubble Space Telescope data he tries to determine the origin of this extreme star, which has likely been ejected by the very young star cluster R136. The cluster is famous for harboring several of these monster stars as shown in earlier work. Now published in MNRAS.