Guido Moyano Loyola
Since the early '60s N-body problems have been studied using numerical simulations. As the computational technologies improved over time, astronomers could start to think in terms of more realistic simulations of stellar clusters. Our understanding of the physics of the stars was also improved as well thanks to the developments in stellar evolution and nucleosynthesis conducted during that time.
It was then obvious that we could not think of gravity as the only factor regarding stellar clusters evolution, we should add stellar evolution to our models (not only for single stars, but binaries too).
One successful advance on this topic was the SSE (Single Stellar Evolution) and BSE (Binary Stellar Evolution) codes made by Hurley et al., 2000 and Hurley et al., 2002. These codes were implemented first in Nbody4 and then in Nbody6.
Within my PhD project a detailed description of nucleosynthesis will be added to these state-of-the-art N-body codes that follow the dynamical, stellar and binary evolution within a stellar cluster. This will enable us to build a self-consistent theory of the chemical evolution of star clusters for the first time.
With this modelling capability we will:
* directly quantify the composition of ejected gas in the dense stellar environment of a star cluster and improve our understanding of the abundance patterns of the various constituent stellar populations
* provide reliable information for models of galactic chemical evolution
* probe the formation mechanism of globular clusters, particularly the increasing obsercvational evidence of multiple generations of stars produced during the cluster formation phate
* quantify the contribution from binaries and open clusters to the population of chemically anomalous stars in the Galactic disk, required information for Galactic Archaeology projects that utilise chemical tagging.
The N-body simulations of globular clusters evolution (including nucleosynthesis) will be performed on the GPU hardware of the new gSTAR supercomputer at Swinburne.
The nucleosynthesis component will be conducted in collaboration with John Lattanzio at Monash University who will provide the results of detailed calculations for AGB stars and type II Supernovae. In the latter stages of the project the output of the star cluster models will be interfaced with semi-analytic and detailed models of galaxy evolution (provided by Darren Croton at Swinburne University) to explore aspects such as abundance variations, e.g. metallicity gradients, related to globular clusters in a range of galaxy environment.
| Phone | +61 3 9214 8708 | |
| Fax | +61 3 9214 8797 | |
| Office | AR310 | |
| Personal Webpage | http://astronomy.swin.edu.au/~gmoyano |