Academic staff

Current projects include:

• Development of a code that combines detailed, live models of the evolution of stars, in particular binaries, with an N-body evolution code capable of treating the complex dynamical processes that occur within stellar clusters. This will improve our understanding of these rich, dense environments, where binary stars form and break up, stars collide and exotic objects, such as X-ray binaries and milisecond pulsars form.
• Investigation of the s-process, the nucleosynthetic process by which many of the heavy elements are formed in stars. The s-process occurs during themal pulses in asymptotic giant branch stars, when protons from the outer envelope are mixed down into the intershell region to form a carbon-13 pocket. This pocket provides a source of neutrons which are absorbed by iron nuclei to form heavier elements, from cobalt up to lead. These elements are ejected in winds at the end of the star's life, and mix with the interstellar gas from which new stars and planets form. The s-process elements in the crust of the Earth today were formed in stars.
• Population studies of gamma-ray burst progenitors. Gamma-ray bursts are the most energetic explosions in the Universe; the intense pulses of gamma rays that we measure at Earth are produced in some of the most distant galaxies yet discovered. A subset of the bursts, the so-called "short" bursts, are thought to emanate from merging double neutron star binaries.By using a rapid population synthesis code to model very large numbers of possible progenitor binaries we can learn about the nature of these binaries and the population of bursts that they form.