When Worlds Collide

Come join us for our monthly Astronomy talk!

7:30pm-8pm: Social time with snacks
8pm: Talk begins

Topic: When Worlds Collide
Speaker: Jacob Kegerreis

Abstract:
Our solar system used to be a much more violent place, with early planets crashing into each other to create the worlds we see today. The talk is about how we use supercomputer simulations to study these cataclysmic giant impacts, and how high-resolution advances are helping us to tackle unsolved mysteries like the origin of our Moon, and how Saturn got its rings.

Bio:
Jacob works at Ames on a NASA postdoctoral fellowship, having moved here not long after doing his PhD at Durham University in the UK, where he is from (London originally). He studies a wide variety of planetary topics, mostly looking at how planets and their moons and rings got to be the way they are, with a particular focus on the massive collisions between planets that drove so much of their early evolution. A lot of his time is spent working on simulation codes to study these events using supercomputers, trying to find ways to improve how realistic our simulations can be and how quickly and efficiently we make them run. He also enjoys working on creating cinematic visualizations of our results driven directly from the simulations, which helps us to get a better sense of what happens in these dramatic, planet-reshaping events.

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