As discussed previously, some galaxies are passive. In other words, boring. Most of the Milky Way’s satellite galaxies are just agglomerations of stars that aren’t doing much. All of the action happened billions of years ago, when those stars formed. At that time, turbulent clouds of gas were collapsing and expanding, and some of those clouds kept collapsing until they became individual stars. All of that gas is gone today,…
Read MoreMia is astrotweeping
Mia de los Reyes has taken over the @astrotweeps Twitter account! She is currently tweeping up a storm about galactic archaeology, manganese, and her insatiable appetite for free food.
Read MoreCollisions of Dead Stars Spray Heavy Elements Throughout Small Galaxies
Hello everyone! I participated in a press conference at the AAS Meeting today announcing some recent results that will be found in a soon-to-be-published-paper. Please check out the press release written by Whitney Clavin describing my work here!
Read MoreUsing manganese to probe Type Ia supernovae
The death of a star As T.S. Eliot probably meant to say, “This is the way a solar-mass star ends / Not with a bang but with a whimper.” When a star like our sun runs out of fuel, it eventually puffs up and releases its outer layers, leaving behind a dense inner core called a white dwarf. In isolation, this white dwarf isn’t particularly interesting. It’s no longer fusing…
Read MoreHeavy Metals
Welcome to Caltech’s Galactic Archaeology blog! In this inaugural post, I’d like to explain what we mean by galactic archaeology. We spend lots of time measuring the composition of stars. Specifically, we pick several elements and attempt to figure out how much of that element is present inside of a star or a galaxy. Different elements encode different information about the star because different elements have different cosmic origins. In…
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