Andrea Perdomo García has recently completed her PhD thesis, Three-dimensional radiative MHD simulations of near-surface convection in main sequence cool stars, supervised by Manuel Collados and myself.
Andrea’s thesis explored the atmospheres of cool main-sequence stars through realistic three-dimensional radiative MHD simulations with the MANCHA code. A major part of her work was devoted to one of the central challenges of such simulations: treating radiative transfer accurately while keeping it computationally feasible. She developed and tested opacity-binning strategies for stars ranging from F to M spectral types, investigated the increasingly important role of molecular opacity toward cooler stars, and studied how different opacity treatments affect atmospheric structure and radiative energy exchange.
She then applied these methods to 3D simulations of G2V, K0V, and M2V stars, exploring their convection and photospheric structure and extending the calculations to magnetic simulations in which fields generated through the Biermann battery were amplified by small-scale dynamo action.
It has been a true pleasure to work with Andrea over the years and to follow her development as a researcher. I wish her all the best in her future career and in her new position at the Max Planck Institute in Heidelberg. I am sure there are many interesting problems, simulations, and probably quite a few opacity tables still ahead!
