Anna Sippel
The goal of my thesis is to follow the evolution of globular cluster models with varying initial parameters, mainly metallicity, up to the Hubble time and beyond. As the metallicity affects the rate of stellar evolution of each individual star, an effect on the whole cluster is expected. I'm investigating the influence of metallicity on structural parameters such as the effective radius. To evolve the models, we use the direct N-body code NBODY6 (Aarseth 2003), which is the most advanced code to evolve star clusters. We make use of the recent possibility to run this code on graphics processing units located here at Swinburne. Only the speed-up in computational time compared to using conventional CPUs makes this project possible.
| Phone | +61 3 9214 5825 | |
| Fax | +61 3 9214 8797 | |
| Office | SA 109 | |
| Personal Webpage | http://astronomy.swin.edu.au/~asippel/ |