Nominator's project description
| The origin of the elements is a fundamental question for mankind. The Big Bang made hydrogen and helium, but what about the carbon on which life is based, the calcium in our bones and the iron in our blood? The answer lies in hot interiors of massive stars in which nuclear fusion makes the heavy elements, a process called nucleosynthesis, that are then ejected back into the Galaxy when a star dies. The oldest surviving stars stars in our Galaxy today are the direct descendants of the short-lived generation of the very first massive stars. As such they preserved the chemical imprint of the first stars, which we can now observe and decipher, in the process of "Galactic archaeology". This helps solve some of the most paramount questions in astrophysics: which stars form which elements, which types of stars formed first, and how do galaxies form? Richard Stancliffe computes detailed models of the evolution of the first stars which enriched the Universe with their nucleosynthesis products. It is his specialty to use the observed abundance patterns in the oldest Galactic stars to understand which mixing processes affected the nucleosynthesis processes in the interior of the first stars. This allows him to understand the element formation in the first stars, and at the same time to predict how mixing affects the evolution and nucleosynthesis of stars in the Universe today. |
