Pedro Osuna

ESA-VO Technical Coordinator

Working as a Software and Systems Engineer for ESA since 1995.
Background on Fundamental Physics. PhD studies in Atomic and
Nuclear Physics department. Thesis (un-finished) started in Free
Electron Lasers within the Applied Physics Department of the ETSI
Aeronauticos of Madrid.

With respect to activities of possible interest to the ESAC
Faculty, I keep my scientific interest and am cooperating with Andy
Pollock in the search of plausible theories for wind interactions
in Colliding Wind Binaries.

The mechanism for interaction within colliding winds does not seem
clear yet. We believe hydrodynamic (or other fluid-like) equations
are not applicable for the phenomenology expected to happen within
this type of winds. This has traditionally been the only approach
taken to unveil the mechanism of shock production in the collision
of the winds.

We believe that full plasma equations have to be applied to the
process, where we might find that a possible shock might be formed
(nearly certainly) through a plasma collisionless effect, making
fluid approach not appropriate. Other possibility might be that a
shock is not formed at all, putting in question all the currently
proposed mechanisms of X- Ray emission from this type of colliding
winds.

Our interest will be devoted to implementing computational
resources to solve plasma equations making full use of distribution
functions, particle dynamics, etc., to unveil the geometry and the
physical parameters of the problem, with special application to
Pollock's preferred star, WR140, of which a lot of information is
available through XMM-Newton and Chandra observations.