Hi! I'm Ewoud Wempe, a PhD researcher focused on simulating the Local Group in a cosmological context.

I work at the Kapteyn Institute in Groningen, the Netherlands, and am supervised by Amina Helmi, alongside Simon White, Guilhem Lavaux and Jens Jasche.

My research interests are the Local Group, near-field cosmology, dark matter, and galaxy formation. I am also passionate about computational astrophysics, particularly in (cosmological) N-body simulations and Bayesian inference.

Explore some of my research!

Local Group simulations

In Wempe et al (2024), I have created a statistically fair sample of constrained Local Group simulations. See a few examples below:

The formation of the Local Group inside the Local Sheet

This video tracks the origin of particles ending up in the Milky Way subhalo (red, on the left), and ending up in the Andromeda subhalo (blue, on the right), in coordinates rotated and scaled such that the MW is at (0,0,0) and M31 is at (1,0,0). This is a 'stack' of 70 simulations, showing the posterior mean. Note that the material first collapses along the z'-axis, and after that most accretion occurs within the sheet. For more, information, check out my upcoming paper!

About Me

In my free time I like to play piano, play chess, bake my own bread, go for a run, and I have a love for mountains and all kinds of things mountain-related (hiking, climbing, snowboarding).

Contact

Please email me at ewoudwempe a abcg.examplemail.com