Modelling
I primarily work on the model suite called reltrans: a relativistic X-ray spectral timing model for the emission of photons from the corona, the Comptonized gas that likely makes up the innermost accretion flow of the black hole. As this model is quite complicated and requires considerable computation to use in inference, I use machine learning to “emulate” the output of the model given some set of input parameters. Emulation allows for an accurate approximation to be used in inference, speeding up the inference process and allowing for the complex modelling space to be better investigated when comparing to real data. I also contribute more generally to the numerical model, mostly in refining the current code and solving bugs.
NEBULA-Xplorer
I am the Principal Investigator for the NEBULA-Xplorer mission at SRON. NEBULA-Xplorer is a mission that seeks to train students from engineering, physics and business backgrounds into the space industry. This is achieved by students actively developing and building the NEBULA-Xplorer mission to industry standards, with the goal of performing real, novel scientific results with the final satellite.
Nebula-Xplorer will perform long term monitoring of X-ray binary sources to capture transient behaviour such as jet ejections. By probing the X-ray emission of these sources, we can investigate the inner-most accretion flow in detail, and in conjunction with other wavelengths, investigate how the different parts of the system affect one another. This will help answer questions about how important magnetic fields and accretion power are on the long term evolution of these systems, including how they affect transient timing behaviour.
