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), and a consultant for Authorea. 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 am a member of the MESA council: MESA Star is an open source code for stellar evolution developed at KITP. 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.
