Data Visualisation Used in my Research
I've been doing astrophysics research for several years; that's a lot of time to make some cool plots of our Universe.
Colliding Wind Binaries
Most of my research so far has focused on the powerful colliding wind binaries. In these systems, the winds of two closely orbiting massive stars collide. The wind of one star overpowers the other, forming a bow shock which condenses the wind and proceeds to copiously form carbon dust. The image above shows a snapshot of a hydrodynamic simulation of exactly this. The coloured regions show the gas density in a 2D slice around the binary stars at the centre. You can see regions of high density even quite far out, and this shows us that dust can live in dense clumps for a long while after formation.
If we plot the same simulation as above, but look at the projected density of the dust from 3D space to 2D space (rather than a 2D slice), we see this:
You can immediately see that the dust formed is extremely 'fluffy' which matches closely real images that powerful telescopes have taken of these systems.
In a 3D hydrodynamics simulation with similar parameters, we produced an animation of the orbital evolution of the stars (this time a 2D density slice). This shows us how the conditions of dust formation change across the orbit.
Supernova Time Dilation
Merging Binary Black Holes Around Supermassive Black Holes
Long-Period Radio Transient Detection
