DATE2021.05.25 #Awards & Prizes

Associate Professor Michiko Fujii wins the 23rd Morita Science Research Encouragement Award

Disclaimer: machine translated by DeepL which may contain errors.

Associate Professor Michiko Fujii

Dr. Michiko Fujii has been studying the dynamical evolution of astronomical objects such as star clusters and galaxies, which are composed of many stars gravitationally bound to each other, by means of large-scale simulations using supercomputers. Star clusters and galaxies are composed of thousands to hundreds of billions of stars, and the evolution of the entire system can be simulated by calculating the orbits of each of these stars by numerical integration. For example, in order to simulate the evolution of an actual galaxy, it is important to develop new computational algorithms due to the enormous amount of calculations required to simulate each individual star.

Fujii has developed a new method for efficient numerical integration of the motion of stars in a cluster and the motion of stars in the galaxy surrounding the cluster, by extending the numerical integration method first developed in the field of planetary system formation simulations. Using this method, he has achieved results in a wide range of fields, including the evolution of star clusters in galaxies, the structure of spiral bowls in galaxies, and the dynamical evolution of star clusters during their formation. He is one of the up-and-coming young researchers in the field of simulated astronomy.

The 23rd Morita Science Encouragement Award
https://www.jauw.org/activity/morita2104/

(Responsibility: Professor Eiichiro Kokubo, Department of Science, National Astronomical Observatory of Japan)