welcome.md

Dear Student,

Welcome to the course on Simulation and Modeling in Astrophysics.

This course is based on live lectures and lab assignments. The changes to the courses' structure, introduced in 2020 and 2023 were well received by the students and we decided to keep the good aspects while abandoning the less well received parts.

• There will be one lecture in the morning and work on projects in the afternoon.
• You will work in teams of three (or the nearest integer number)
• You will be working on a self-defined computational astrophysics project.
• The environment used in these projects is AMUSE.

There is a wiki with documentation about the course and a git page with educational material to support the educational material. Then, there is the book (Astrophysical Recipes, still based on Python 2.7, but a new release is expected next year).

There are tutorials available in the form of Python notebooks. Besides communicating via Brighspace, we will use git, Slack, and email. Please join the Slack channel on Simulation and Modeling in Astrophysics.

The University wants us to use Brightspace, but we have an excellent experience using Slack, git, and the wiki. If you are still getting familiar with any of these, ensure you know how they work before starting the course.

All further information is available on the wiki.

During this course, you will work on a research project using existing computational tools and state-of-the-art simulation codes. You will be using the AMUSE software. You will learn how to perform astronomical simulations and assess the results.

Your final score will reflect your ability to use the simulation environment, how to conduct scientific computations and research in general.

Our first live session is on September 6 at 11:00, in room HL411

• We will do an introductory round.
• Then we will do a little test (Don't panic: you cannot fail).
• We use the test results to judge your initial expertise.
• The lectures are not recorded.

Good luck,

Simon Portegies Zwart