Welcome to the House of Jorick Vink

• Mass Loss & Stellar Cosmology
  Mass Loss is the most important "driver" of stellar evolution in massive stars. I have developed Mass loss descriptions on the basis of Monte Carlo simulations of radiation-driven winds. The models are in good agreement with observational mass loss indicators over a wide range of stellar parameters. The final goal is to predict mass loss over the entire evolution of a massive star at all cosmological epochs.

• Very Massive Stars (VMS) in the Local Universe
  Very Massive Stars are objects up to 300 times the mass of the Sun. They are dominant agents of ionizing radiation and kinetic energy, but their formation, evolution, and fate are as yet a complete mystery. What we do know is that their proximity to the Eddington Gamma limit is crucially important for their mass loss and evolution. Mass-loss rates increase dramatically when objects cross a critical Eddington Gamma factor (Vink et al. 2011; Bestenlehner et al. 2014). I have recently edited a book on "Very Massive Stars" including a mass-loss "chapter".

• The circumstellar geometries around Young Stars
  The tool of spectropolarimetry is arguably the most powerful tool to probe the innermost regions around young T Tau and Herbig stars. For instance, spectropolarimetry of Herbig Be stars provides the best evidence to date that these massive pre-main sequence (PMS) stars are surrounded by accretion disks.

• Horizontal Branch morphology and globular clusters
  

• IPHAS and VPHAS+ Halpha Surveys of the Northern and Southern Galactic Plane
  

• Usage of Spectral Energy Distributions in Target Selection
  Spectroscopic targets are usually selected via magnitude (and sometimes colour) cutoffs on the basis of Hertzsprung-Russell diagram locations. This may inadvertently exclude interesting objects. Objects that are relatively dim at optical wavelengths but brighter in other parts of the spectrum (Eg OB stars) may be missed using colour/magnitude cutoffs based on optical or infrared surveys, but they can yet be detected using "spectral energy distributions (SEDs)", which incorporate several magnitudes, representing flux density versus wavelength. We are using SEDs based on SDSS, 2MASS and other surveys to identify uncharacterised objects in the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC) that a simple colour/magnitude cut may exclude. We use Kurucz and TLUSTY model packages for our SEDs. The team is comprised of Dr Jorick Vink, Dr Venu Kalari (supervisors) and Cormac Larkin (Research Collaborator; cormaclarkin domain: yahoo_ie).

Contact details

Email: jsv (domain: arm_ac_uk)
Phone: +44 (0)28 3751 2951