I am a PhD student at the Division of Astrophysics, in the Department of Physics at Lund University, where I am supervised by Dr. Oscar Agertz and Dr. Santi Roca-Fàbrega. 

My research in short

In my research, I mainly focus on galaxy formation and evolution in the era of JWST (the James Webb Space Telescope), where I investigate the appearances of disc-like galaxies and their kinematics at high redshifts. To do this, I employ high-resolution cosmological zoom-in simulations of Milky Way-mass galaxies, comparing the simulations with observations of galaxies in the early Universe, to investigate the underlying physics driving the early disc-formation. 

Galaxy formation in the era of JWST

You might have heard that our planet Earth is more than 4 billion years old. Sounds like a long time doesn’t it? If we compare it to the cosmic timeline, this is less than a third of the age of the Universe. The Big Bang, which marks the beginning of the Universe as we know it, occurred 13.8 billion years ago, after which the Universe began expanding and cooling. From our cosmological models, we estimate that it would take about 100 million years before the first stars and galaxies started to form in what we call dark matter halos, during an epoch known as the Cosmic Dawn. 

With the launch of JWST, we have been able to observe galaxies at higher redshifts than ever before. Redshift, often denoted by "z", tells us how much the frequency of the light we observe from the galaxies have been "shifted" towards lower frequencies compared to the emitted light. The shift in frequency is caused by the expansion of the Universe. This means that redshift decreases with time, so for observations within our own galaxy and of close-by galaxies, the redshift is z = 0. High-redshift galaxies on the other hand, are galaxies far far away that we observe in their early stages, because the light has spent a long time reaching us. Currently, as of March 2025, the highest spectroscopically confirmed redshift of a galaxy is z ~14, which corresponds to a time at less than 300 million years after the Big Bang. We expect these early galaxies to be smaller, experience more mergers, and be affected by more violent inflows/outflows and stronger stellar feedback. In other words, we expect the galactic systems to be more chaotic than evolved galaxies such as the Milky Way. Recent observations from JWST, however, have shown appearances of disc-like structures in galaxies at redshifts as high as z = 7-9. Some of these galaxies even show signatures of being stable rotating discs, which is again something we associate with more evolved low-redshift galaxies. 

One way to investigate the observed early disc-settlement and their kinematics, meaning the motion of the galactic discs, is by using cosmological simulations. The simulations are based on theoretical models for how the Universe and the matter within it evolves. They allow us to study how galactic discs form and evolve through time, and if they are rotating or dominated by turbulence, according to our models. Our predictions can then be compared to observations. In my research, I use simulations of Milky Way-like galaxies to investigate the early formation of galactic discs and how they behave, where I aim to help answer the question: how are galaxies, such as the Milky Way, formed? 

Fun fact

Dinosaurs from the early Cretaceous period, such as the Austrosaurus, lived on the other side of the Milky Way. This is because our Solar System completes an orbit every ~230 million years.