Eduardo Vitral

I am an astrophysicist, currently working as a postdoctoral researcher at the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI), and member of the HSTPROMO collaboration. I am also very interested in outreach, and sharing my passion for the cosmos with the general public. My research focuses on the dynamical modeling of dense stellar systems like globular clusters and dwarf galaxies. The main question I aim to answer is: “How dynamical interactions shape the evolution of dense stellar systems?”. This leads to interesting research topics, from the smallest scales of galaxy evolution and its relation with the still mysterious dark matter, down to the formation and clustering of compact objects such as black holes and white dwarfs. To study these aspects, I use astronomical data from the Hubble Space Telescope, the Gaia astrometric mission, as well as numerical simulations. I was born and raised in the Brazilian sea of hills from Minas Gerais.

I attended the Instituto Tecnológico de Aeronáutica (ITA, Aerospace Engineering), and further moved to École polytechnique (l'X, France), where I graduated in Engineering and obtained my master's degree in Astrophysics, together with the Paris Observatory master's program. I obtained my Ph.D. in Astrophysics in 2022 at Institut d'Astrophysique de Paris (Sorbonne Université).

Education:

PhD in Astrophysics, Sorbonne Université, France
MSc in Astrophysics (French M2), Université Paris Diderot / Observatoire de Paris, France
BSc & MSc (French M1) in Engineering/Physics, École polytechnique (l’X), France
B.Sc. in Aerospace Engineering (unfinished), Instituto Tecnológico de Aeronáutica (ITA), Brazil

Research Topics: Globular clusters, dwarf galaxies, black holes, dark matter, mass-modelling

Professional Websites:

Professional Website

ORCID ID: 0000-0002-2732-9717