- Tuesday, October 16, 2018
- 3:45 PM–4:45 PM
- Science Building 110
Students Michaela Blain, Evan Cook, and Sarah Whitten will be presenting a seminar entitled "A Tool Box for Binary Stars."
Come to the Physics and Astronomy Department's Seminar on Tuesday, October 16 at 3:45 pm in SB 110. Students Michaela Blain, Evan Cook and Sarah Whitten will give a presentation together, entitled "A Tool Box for Binary Stars." Refreshments will be served before the seminar in SB157.
This team that conducted research together this summer shares their summary:
We want to understand the mechanisms that drive the life cycle of contact binary stars. We hope that understanding might lead to an observing strategy that can catch star systems in the last stages before a merger. To pursue this we use a variety of computational tools. MESA computes the internal structure and time evolution of single stars. PHOEBE uses observations of brightness variations and radial velocities to determine binary star physical parameters such as mass ratio and inclination. LightCurveSearch computes orbital periods and their time variations from brightness variation observations. Finally, we analyze the statistical properties of stellar catalogs, using relative abundances of various sorts of binaries to evaluate their physical relationships.
Location details
SB 110
