Magnetic secrets of methanol in space
See me drawing live! Here I illustrate a press release by my colleague Boy Lankhaar on how to measure magnetic fields using observations of methanol.
Star formation and magnetic fields in astrophysics:
free materials for outreach, teaching, and research.
I hear and I forget. I see and I remember.
Artist's impressions have a key role in transmitting new discoveries from scientists to the public, and from scientists to scientists. This happens every time that instrumentation cannot offer immediately understandable images. Drawings and cartoons try to express what astronomers deduce from their analyses: chemical composition, temperature, morphologies, and so on.
I like drawing, so it happens often that I illustrate some aspects of my research. Over the years, my images have been included in press releases, in Youtube videos, in my own PhD thesis, in posters for conference. Some people have expressed appreciation for them, and sometimes asked for more. So in this page I share some of my illustrations and cartoons, hoping they may come useful to other astronomers trying to explain the same concepts.
My work focuses on star formation and magnetic fields, so most of my illustrations revolve around those topics.
License
All images in this site are licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license (CC BY-NC-SA).Highligths
Planet formation
Cartoon depicting some steps of planet formation. I drew it to illustrate a press release by my colleague Per Bjerkeli. It was later used in a commentary on Nature Astronomy.
Recent Work
Protostar with accretion disc and outflow
Also available without text and lines.
Protostar with accretion disc and outflow
Magnetic field lines being twisted in an ISM cloud.
Drift and distortion of the magnetic field during the collapse of a protostar.
Also available as a pdf.
Amplification of radiation in an astrophysical maser .
Stimulated emission is the physical process that powers masers. The figure shows the amplification of radiation from excited molecules (a) which stimulates the emission of an identical photon (b) and generates a chain reaction (c-e) powering the maser. Excited molecules are depicted as the larger, green spheres; disexcited molecules as the smaller, blue spheres.
Zeeman effect: a spectral line is split in three components when a magnetic field is present.
Also available as a pdf.
Maser beaming in the saturated and unsutared regions.
The width of the orange beam is proportional to the intensity of the maser; a linear increase in the saturated region is not drawn. The maser amplification terminates once the maser passes from the unsuturated into the saturated region.
Also available as a pdf.
More content will be uploaded soon.
Get In Touch
CV and list of publications
You can download my CV, while here is my list of publications.