Instituto de Física y Astronomía

PhD: The Pennsylvania State University, Pennsylvania, USA (2014)
Research Area: Star Formation, Star Clusters, Galactic Astronomy, X-ray Astronomy, IR Astronomy, Astrostatistics, Statistical Modelling
Telephone: (+56 32) 250 8457
email:  michael.kuhn at uv.cl
Webpage: http://ifa.uv.cl/~mkuhn/

About my research: My work focuses on the formation of stars and young stellar clusters. Most stars are born in clusters along with hundreds to thousands of other stars--for example it is likely that the Sun was born in such an environment. I use observations across the spectrum of light, including infrared and X-ray, to study the young stellar clusters in our Galaxy and make a census of their newborn stars. There are a number of open questions about how stars form, motivated by different theoretical models of for stellar cluster formation. By studying the populations of young stars, we can constrain models for how star-formation progresses (e.g. Do clusters form suddenly or gradually?) and the fate of young embedded clusters (e.g. Which environments produce bound open clusters?) in star-forming regions. I am interested in the use of spatial statistics to learn about subclustering, dynamical relaxation, cluster expansion, and mass segregation, and non-coeval star-formation history in star-forming regions.