I am a postdoctoral researcher at the Argelander-Institut für Astronomie (AIfA), working in the stellar astrophysics group led by Prof. Norbert Langer. My research involves studying the effects of massive stars on their environment, using theoretical and computational models.

As part of my work I develop and maintain a code, pion, for modelling photoionisation and magnetohydrodynamics. pion is a distributed-memory parallel code, and scales well for 3D simulations to at least 1024 cores. There will eventually be a public release of the code, but it is not quite ready yet.

I am very involved in our group's project, "Effects of Massive Stars on their Surroundings", supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) priority program 1573, Physics of the Interstellar Medium. With Prof. Langer I am co-advising a PhD student, Dominique Meyer, whose work is also part of this project.

Before I came to Bonn I completed my PhD at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, working with Dr. Andrew Lim. I used an early version of pion to investigate the formation and evolution of massive pillars of gas and dust such as the Eagle Nebula pillars (shown to the right). These pillars, also known as elephant trunks, are observed at the boundaries of H II regions and are often active sites of star formation.

Contact Details

Argelander-Institut für Astronomie,
Universität Bonn,
Auf dem Hügel 71,
D-53121 Bonn, Germany.

Room: AIfA, Room 1.020a.
Phone: +49 (0)228 733783
Email: jmackey@astro.uni-bonn.de
WWW: http://www.astro.uni-bonn.de/~jmackey/

My research is funded by a postdoctoral fellowship from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation.