welcome.md

(Welcome message from last year, but still relevant) Dear Student,

Welcome to the course on Simulation and Modeling in Astrophysics. This course consists of live lectures and lab assignments. The changes to the courses' structure, introduced in 2020, was well received by the students and we decided to keep the good aspects while abandoning the less well received parts.

• There will be one lecture in the morning and work on projects in the afternoon.
• You will work in teams of three (or the nearest integer number)
• You will be working on a self-defined computational astrophysics project.
• The environment used in these projects is AMUSE.

All necessary information for the course can be found on this git repository. Familiarise yourself with the content. In understanding how to use AMUSE as a programming tools, tutorials are provided alongside the textbook which gives a deeper understanding of the codes, their techniques used, some free parameters influencing their integration and examples to show the capabilities.

Communication on any updates regarding course material will be provided on the Brightspace, email, git or Slack. You can also contact the teaching assistants via Slack. All further information is available on the wiki.

During this course, you will work on a research project using existing computational tools and state-of-the-art simulation codes. You will be using the AMUSE software. You will learn how to perform astronomical simulations and assess the results.

Your final score will reflect your ability to use the simulation environment, how to conduct scientific computations and research in general.

Our first live session is on September 3 at 11:00, in room WB0.29

• We will do an introductory round,
• discuss computational astrophysics at large.
• and assemble teams
• Lectures are not recorded.

Good luck,

Simon Portegies Zwart