New docent in astronomy

Arjan Bik at the Department of Astronomy has been promoted to docent. Arjan’s research focuses on the effect massive stars have on their surroundings, both at small scales (on proto-planetary discs), and on larger scales (on the interstellar medium inside star-forming galaxies).

Arjan Bik. Photo: Angela Adamo.

On January 29th Arjan Bik was appointed to docent by the Faculty board of Natural Sciences at Stockholm University. Arjan is a member of two research groups at the Department of Astronomy. He uses telescopes such as the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) and Very Large Telescope in Chile for his research.

In the Galaxy group, his research focuses on the effect newly formed massive stars have on their surroundings. These stars emit copious amounts of energetic radiation as well as strong stellar winds of particles and can thus affect the gas within the galaxies (the so called interstellar medium). This process is known as feedback and is of great importance to how the galaxies evolve over time.

Within the Group for stars, planets, and astrobiology Arjan research how so called proto-planetary discs form and evolve. The disc structures are important to understand to find out how planets form. Feedback from massive stars in the vicinity of these discs can affect them greatly. Arjan uses high resolution observations from JWST to study this process in detail.

JWST image of the young stellar cluster Pismis 24 located around 5500 lightyears away within the Lobster Nebula in our galaxy. The intense radiation and stellar winds from the massive stars in the cluster has a strong impact on the gas in the nebula. Photo: NASA, ESA, CSA, and STScI, A. Pagan (STScI).

Arjan is also a member in several international collaborations, among others, the European JWST/MIRI consortium and both the science and technical project teams for the upcoming instrument MOSAIC which will be installed at the European Southern Observatory’s Extremely Large Telescope.