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Michael Küffmeier

Welcome to my website! On this website you can get to know more about my research. Since September 2020 I have been working on my research project "InAndOut: Towards a complete understanding of young, embedded disks". From September 2020 until September 2022, I was affiliated with the University of Virginia in Charlottesville (USA) and I joined the Center for Astrochemical Studies (CAS) at the Max-Planck-Institute of Extraterrestrial Physics (MPE) in Munich-Garching in September 2022. The project is funded by the Horizon 2020 initiative. Before having started my fellowship in Virginia, I was an independent postdoctoral fellow at Heidelberg University in the group of Prof. Kees Dullemond after completion of my PhD at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen in 2017. Browse around to learn more about my past and current activities, my latest research, as well as my travel plans. Happy stalking and please don't hesitate to contact me if you have any further questions.

UPCOMING EVENTS

Heidelberg-Harvard star formation workshop

 

07.12.2022-09.12.2022

MY LATEST RESEARCH

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Stars often occur as systems of binaries or higher order. For young embedded protostellar multiples, high-resolution observations with modern telescopes such as ALMA reveal the presence of arc and bridge-like structures associated with protostellar multiples. Using the zoom-in technique, we demonstrated that these bridge structures are a natural consequence of the underlying turbulence present in the parental Giant Molecular Cloud. The corresponding paper got featured on the cover page of the Ausgust edition of Astronomy & Astrophysics. More recently, we published a follow-up study in which we found that linear polarization of dust reemission observed at mm-wavelength can be used as tracer of the magnetic field around young protostars.

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Observations show the presence of shadows for multiple disks. Such shadows can be nicely explained by a configuration of an inner disk that is misaligned with respect to an outer disk. In a series of papers, we investigated the effect of late infall and recently showed that late infall onto an existing star-disk system can lead to the formation of misaligned inner and outer disk. By post-processing the simulation data with a radiative transfer code, we show how the inner disk casts a shadow on the second-generation outer disk.

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