Welcome to the Home Page of Matteo Cantiello
I am an astrophysicist working as an associate specialist at the KITP (Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics) at University of California Santa Barbara (UCSB). My research focuses on the evolution of single and binary stars, with a particular focus on the most massive ones. I am especially interested in those stars that are believed to be the progenitors of the most energetic explosions in the universe: supernovae and gamma-ray bursts. To understand these amazing phenomena, I calculate detailed models of stars including the effects of rotation, magnetic fields, pulsations and binary interaction. Stars are self-gravitating balls of hot plasma, in their interiors various kind of circulation and instabilities take place, in a similar way as hydrodynamical instabilities and circulations occur in the Earth's ocean and atmosphere. The analogy might seem like a stretch, but things like convection, thermohaline mixing and rotational mixing do occur in stars and need to be included in the models. I also work on 3D simulations of convection, for which I do use the Pencil code, a high order MPI code for MHD. I am a member of the VLT-FLAMES Tarantula Survey consortium, an international collaboration studying an amazing sample of about 1000 massive stars in the LMC cluster 30 Doradus.
