Sabelo Kunene is an MSc Astrophysics student at the University of the Western Cape (UWC). He recently returned from Belgium, where he presented and discussed his research with an international audience of experts and scientists. His work focuses on using SKIRT (Stellar Kinematics Including Radiative Transfer) computational code to simulate and understand the kinematics – studying how things are moving, not why they're moving – of galaxies, particularly in the context of neutral hydrogen gas (HI).

His project aims to produce HI rotation curves and critically use them as a probe of the physical properties of galaxies. By extracting HI from a simulated galaxy and applying radiative transfer to it using SKIRT, he models the kinematics derived from the simulation data to study the dynamics and dark matter in the galaxies.

Read Kunene’s journal: