The Chemistry of Stars - Current Research at UW Oshkosh

The astronomical research taking place today at UW Oshkosh is centered around studies of the evolution of low mass stars. It is important that we understand such stars because the more massive a star is, the faster it evolves. If we look around at the oldest stars in the Universe today, they are all about 80% the mass of the Sun or less. All the more massive stars from those early days have since evolved into white dwarfs, neutron stars, or maybe even black holes.
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Many of our papers are available online through NASA's Astrophysical Data Systems archive service. The links below will call up searches for each of the authors. Note that the most recent papers may not be available for free download yet. If you are interested in some of our other papers from the Canadian Journal of Physics or Nature, let me know.

Papers by Dr. Briley

Papers by Susan Bellman (UW Oshkosh undergraduate/graduate student)

Papers by Jeremy Buss (UW Oshkosh undergraduate)

Papers by Dan Kramer (UW Oshkosh undergraduate)

My research program centers around the observation of old low-mass stars to better understand how they evolve. This is important because it is these very stars which tell us the age of our galaxy (the Milky Way) and also the Universe (well, OK, the minimum age of the Universe). You may be aware of the problem between the age of the Universe derived from stars (13 - 14 billion years or so) and the age as determined from observations of distant galaxies (11 -12 billion years). In order to help resolve this discrepancy, we must really understand how low-mass stars evolve, which is part of what is going on here at UW Oshkosh.

Moreover, because these stars are so old, they can also tell us a lot about what the conditions were like in the early Milky Way and shed some light on the processes which shaped its formation. Most of our recent efforts have been focused on trying to understand the origins of the inhomogenieites in light elements found among the members of the galactic globular clusters (see the Research page for more information on this work).

All of this research is open to student involvement. Through a grant from the National Science foundation, you can actually get paid to help me work on these problems. But there's more to it than this. These projects aren't just busy work - you will gain valuable experience performing real research, which can be a real asset both in getting a job or going on to graduate school after UW Oshkosh.

A list of at least some possible projects is given on my Student Research Opportunities Page.

If you are interested and would like to talk more about this opportunity, drop me a line.

Our work here involves a large amount of image processing plus the modeling of stellar atmospheres and spectra. To support this work, we currently use a small cluster of Sun workstations:

• A Sparcstation 5 (1 x 70Mhz)
• A Sparcstation 10 (2 x 40Mhz)
• A Sparcserver 20 (2 x 150Mhz)
• An Ultrasparc Enterprise Server (2 x 167MHz) with an 18 x 2.1Gb storage array
• An Ultrasparc 5 (1 x 270MHz)
• An Ultrasparc 5 (1 x 330MHz)
• A Sun Blade 1000 (1 x 750Mhz)

Available software:

• Sun Solaris 8.0
• Sun Workshop compilers (C, C++,and Fortran)
• IRAF (an image processing suite from NOAO)
• IDL (the Interacive Data Language)
• MARCS (a proprietary model atmosphere code)
• SSG (a proprietary synthetic spectrum and color generator)
• MOOG (a synthetic spectrum generator)

Telescopes:

In addition to the telescopes we have access to through our collaborators (Keck, Lick, McDonald, the VLT, etc.), UW Oshkosh is also a member of the Kitt Peak 0.9-m consortium. The telescope is particularly well suited to wide field imaging applications and we are gauranteed about 12 nights per year of use. Current projects include:

• A metallicity study of the Sextans dwarf spheroidal galaxy
• A search for CH-stars in globular clusters
• The chemical makeup of globular cluster stars
• Mapping out the Milky Way's spiral arms using its OB-assocations