Friday, January 19th, 2007

 

Prof. Eric Sandquist, San Diego State University

" The Inner Lives of Giant Stars "

2:00 pm in room P-148

The end of the two giant phases in the lives of stars like the Sun are the last gaps left to be bridged in astronomy. The events surrounding the ignition of helium fusion have a good deal of physics and astrophysics interest -- from examining the behavior of plasma at high density and temperature to improving the accuracy of the distance scale within the Local Group of galaxies. A major difficulty is that giant stars evolve quickly (for an astronomer's tastes), and makes it difficult to find examples for study. This talk will discuss our efforts to identify large numbers of giant stars in globular clusters in order to examine the evolution rates of these stars. Along the way, we discovered a surprisingly robust way of examining neutrino emission by these stars, and uncovered new evidence of strong (and variable) mass loss.