Twitter Facebook LinkedIn YouTube

Georgios Tsirvoulis was born in 1987 in Katerini, Greece. He studied Physics, with a major in Astronomy, at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, from which he graduated in 2011. He then continued his studies at the Department of Physics and Astronomy of Uppsala University, Sweden, where he was awarded the MSc in Astronomy and Space Sciences in 2013. His research interests include Celestial mechanics, Dynamics of planetary systems and small bodies, and general dynamical systems. George is currently an Early Stage Researcher at the Astronomical Observatory of Belgrade, Serbia, as a part of the "STARDUST-The Asteroids and Space Debris Network"  Marie-Curie ITN. His work focuses on the study of the transportation mechanisms that lead asteroids from the Main-belt to the Near-Earth region.

Project description:

The collisional asteroid families are known to be one of the main sources of the Near Earth Asteroids (NEA). Violent collisions among asteroids inject fragments into powerful resonances, which are then responsible for the transportation of these bodies into the region of the terrestrial planets. Identifying from which family particular NEAs may have originated is of primary importance to predict possible impacts with the Earth and identify the characteristics of the impactor. The recent availability of new data (e.g. data from WISE or PanSTARRS) provides a new opportunity to connect many NEAs with their origins. Finding such links would make it possible to reveal many more details about both, the asteroid families and NEAs. Due to the chaotic nature of motion of most NEAs, firm links will be possible to be established only for a limited number of objects/families. However, such links would be crucial to test different models of transport from families to the NEA population. For some families we expect to be able to say what fraction of their members is present in the current NEA population.

Supervisor: Dr. Zoran Knezevic and Dr. Bojan Novakovic.



Georgios' Work

 
 
Funded by