Judit Szulagyi's website

I am an assistant professor and lead the Computational Astrophysics group at ETH Zurich. I am also the PI of an ERC Starting grant (2021-2025) and a project leader within the PlanetS collaboration. Previously, I was a senior research associate and a principal investigator of an Ambizione grant by the Swiss National Science Foundation at the University of Zurich.

Within my group, we are interested in hydrodynamic simulations of astrophysical disks, e.g. disks around stars, planets and even black holes. We tackle questions mainly around planet- & moon-formation, disk evolution, but recently also around black-hole mergers. We combine techniques of 3D radiative (or thermo-) hydrodynamical simulations including gas+dust treatment, Monte Carlo population synthesis, N-body simulations, radiative transfer, chemistry-solvers, machine learning. We are not only interested in theory, we also create mock observations from our simulations to help interpreting telescope data, as well as being part of various observational proposals.

In 2017, I was selected among the "Forbes 30 under 30 in Science" by the Forbes Magazine.

My research group's website is here: https://szulagyi-group.ethz.ch/

CV -- American Style

CV -- European Style (Swiss)

Publication List in PDF

Link to NASA ADS

Numerical Simulations of Planet- and Moon-Formation

In the era where thousands of exoplanets are known, we still have the difficulty to understand how our Solar System and other planetary systems came to be. To seek for answers, we are using and developing 3D thermo-hydrodynamical simulations of forming planets embedded in their natal gaseous disks. We often combine this with Monte Carlo population synthesis, N-body simulations to get a more comprehensive view on planet- and moon formation, and to cover larger parameter space to capture the entire diverse planet & moon populations that are known today.

Observational Predictions

We strongly believe that theory and observations only together can answer e.g. how planets are forming. For this purpose, we post-process our simulations with radiative transfer tools and chemistry-solvers to create mock observational images that a telescope would see, estimate line-luminosities in spectra and create mock spectral energy distributions. With our predictions at hands, we also participate in observational proposals to instruments like ALMA, SPHERE, JWST, etc.

Black Hole Mergers

When two galaxies merge, their central supermassive black holes start to spiral around each other in a gaseous disk, and possibly eventually merge. This merger supposed to emit gravitational waves, however such signatures have been found only in the case of stellar-mass black hole mergers. With thermo-hydrodynamical simulations we want to study the orbital evolution and accretion of supermassive black hole binaries to understand whether they merge at all, and if yes, on what timescale.