Stellar structure and evolution

Bruce Carney
Chris Clemens

Bruce Carney studies the Galaxy's oldest stars, including binary orbits and what they reveal about the stars' ages and evolution, the chemical abundance patterns and what they reveal about the earliest stages of nucleosynthesis in the Galaxy, and on pulsating stars that are often used as "standard candles" to determine distances to star clusters and other galaxies.

Chris Clemens primarily studies the self-excited resonant oscillations of stars or "starquakes". Through high precision monitoring of a star's brightness and surface velocities, he studies the interior properties using methods analogous to terrestrial seismology. His work in this area has focused on the compact stellar remnants known as white dwarf stars. He also studies low mass binary stars, both interacting and non-interacting, to measure basic stellar properties with high precision.