I'm finding it really hard to concentrate on work at the moment, I guess with about half the department already gone for Christmas my motivation to do some work is beginning to wane. So in lieu of doing anything truly useful I thought I'd write about work for a while.
Job Applications: As of today I have sent off 12 job applications, and have four more in the pipeline. Two things really struck me when looking over the application list. Firstly, in common with the rest of academia, it seems pretty inevitable that I'm shortly going to be moving somewhere far away for a short term contract, although I have no real idea even what continent I will be on (indeed the last six applications I have put in have been to Zurich, Leiden, Barcelona, San Diego, Oxford and Santa Barbara). I guess depending on how I look at it this is either the best or worst part of the job. Secondly I haven't even checked how much a single one of these jobs pay. There can't be too many fields where this (I think) is common behaviour.
Simulations: With the physics code I have been working on for the best part of two years now we can create simulated galaxies with a pretty much unprecedented level of realism (CMB et al (2006)). I'm really happy to have all this finished off. The last bit of my thesis is going to be about the dynamics of gravitational interactions between typical spiral galaxies.
For a bit of fun I thought I'd simulate the fate of the Milky Way, which within about 3Gyr is due to collide with the nearby Andromeda galaxy. Here is a quickly hacked together movie of a low-resolution version of this simulation (well, as far as it had got by this morning, when I made the movie). The only thing that is shown is the old disk of stars in each galaxy.
Pretty Movie.
If anybody has trouble getting the movie to play could you let me know, along with any error messages you get. The full resolution version of this simulation is going to be used for three main things:
1. I want to probe the statistics of star formation in tidal tails (those great big streams of stars that are generated during the collision), and also look at the properties of the final object, which hopefully will look like a typical elliptical galaxy
2. Look at the properties of stars formed in the strong shocks generated during a galaxy collision. Our physical model for the interstellar medium should work really nicely here.
3. I want to make an absolutely beautiful movie showing where stars are forming, where all the different types of gas in the galaxy are located and maybe even the possible fate of the Earth. I might use dalsim for this and am really going to get it looking as realistic as possible for publicity purposes.
Job Applications: As of today I have sent off 12 job applications, and have four more in the pipeline. Two things really struck me when looking over the application list. Firstly, in common with the rest of academia, it seems pretty inevitable that I'm shortly going to be moving somewhere far away for a short term contract, although I have no real idea even what continent I will be on (indeed the last six applications I have put in have been to Zurich, Leiden, Barcelona, San Diego, Oxford and Santa Barbara). I guess depending on how I look at it this is either the best or worst part of the job. Secondly I haven't even checked how much a single one of these jobs pay. There can't be too many fields where this (I think) is common behaviour.
Simulations: With the physics code I have been working on for the best part of two years now we can create simulated galaxies with a pretty much unprecedented level of realism (CMB et al (2006)). I'm really happy to have all this finished off. The last bit of my thesis is going to be about the dynamics of gravitational interactions between typical spiral galaxies.
For a bit of fun I thought I'd simulate the fate of the Milky Way, which within about 3Gyr is due to collide with the nearby Andromeda galaxy. Here is a quickly hacked together movie of a low-resolution version of this simulation (well, as far as it had got by this morning, when I made the movie). The only thing that is shown is the old disk of stars in each galaxy.
Pretty Movie.
If anybody has trouble getting the movie to play could you let me know, along with any error messages you get. The full resolution version of this simulation is going to be used for three main things:
1. I want to probe the statistics of star formation in tidal tails (those great big streams of stars that are generated during the collision), and also look at the properties of the final object, which hopefully will look like a typical elliptical galaxy
2. Look at the properties of stars formed in the strong shocks generated during a galaxy collision. Our physical model for the interstellar medium should work really nicely here.
3. I want to make an absolutely beautiful movie showing where stars are forming, where all the different types of gas in the galaxy are located and maybe even the possible fate of the Earth. I might use dalsim for this and am really going to get it looking as realistic as possible for publicity purposes.
