Marcio Guilherme Bronzato de Avellar

I am a post-doc at the Instituto de Astronomia, Geofísica e Ciências Atmosféricas at Universidade de São Paulo, Brasil.

Recently, I joined the Relativistic Astrophysics group of Prof. Luciano Rezzolla at the department of Theoretical Physics at the J.W. Goethe-University in Frankfurt am Main.

Room: 02.232
email: (@th.physik.uni-frankfurt.de) avellar

Research interests

My main topic of research are compact stars (neutron stars, hybrid stars and quark stars) and binary systems in which at least one of the components is such a compact object. I have been working on the many theoretical and observational aspects of these systems, i.e., the equation of state of the compact stars and the X-ray astrophysics (mainly QPOs). With prof. Rezzolla and his team I am going to use numerical methods in relativistic hydrodynamics to model QPOs in neutron star low-mass X-ray binaries.

Biographical remarks

I am bachelor in Molecular Sciences by Universidade de São Paulo (USP). After that I obtained a Master in Astrophysics studying analytical solutions for the structure of neutron stars under supervision of prof. Dr. Jorge E. Horvath. During my doctorate, also under supervision of prof. Horvath at USP, I spent a year at the Kapteyn Astronomical Institute, in Groningen, the Netherlands, under supervision of prof. Dr. Mariano Méndez, where I begun my X-ray astrophysics research. Back to Brazil, I concomitantly begun to study information theory and what it can tell us about the equation of state of neutron stars. I defended my thesis in 2012 and got a post-doc position.

My interests then diversified and I collaborate in projects involving the neutron star systems “black widows” and “red backs”, local vs global charge neutrality in neutron stars, phase transitions and astrobiology.

Now, I dedicate my time to relativistic hydrodynamics, a subject from which I want to get a deeper understanding of the mechanisms that produce the QPOs seen in the X-ray light curve of neutron star low-mass X-ray binaries.