Prof. Dr. Hubert Klahr

Turbulence in Planet Formation

Please see my publications online ADS

Turbulence in the disks around young stars has been fascinating me for many years. This turbulence is vital in process to form planets. The gas disks appear like gigantic weather systems with storms, hurricanes, tornados, but also gentle flows like gulf-stream in the ocean or the Jet streams in the atmosphere. I am using pencil and paper to understand the fundamental processes that lead to instability and turbulence. I run large scale computer simulations of the turbulence on high performance compute clusters and whenever I can I check experiments on rotating fluids to learn more about the gas turbulence as it was 4.5 Billion years ago in our solar system, and is now occurring in disks many light years away.

There are two ways I work. Either with pencil and paper… or on a black board:

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or with some really cool high performance computer COBRA:Pasted Graphic 1


…and RAVEN at the MPCDF in Garching:Pasted Graphic 2