Phil Hopkins

"Phil Hopkins is a professor of astrophysics at CalTech, and one of the main PIs of the FIRE collaboration. he is probably one of the most talented people in the field (or the planet honestly) with numerical codes and high-performance computing."
- Lina Necib

Connecting stars, galaxies, and supermassive black holes from AU to megaparsecs
Many problems in astrophysics involve a tremendous scale separation, where small and large scales strongly couple to one another. I’ll talk about how our group has sought to address this in simulations and models of star, galaxy, and supermassive black hole formation and evolution. I’ll present some recent highlights on a diverse range of topics, ranging from the behavior of dust grains or cosmic rays in the interstellar medium, to “feedback” from stars in the form of jets, winds, radiation, and supernovae. I’ll then discuss the particularly dramatic example of supermassive black holes, where recent multi-physics and multi-scale simulations have transformed our understanding of how such black holes could form, “where they come from,” and how they influence galaxies. With the novel ability to follow the radiation-magneto-thermo-chemistry from scales of megaparsecs down to AU scales in all of these systems, we are now seeing that much of the “conventional wisdom” in these subfields need to be revised.