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Full-Text Articles in Physical Sciences and Mathematics

Understanding Atmospheres Across The Stellar-Substellar Boundary, Eileen C. Gonzales Sep 2020

Understanding Atmospheres Across The Stellar-Substellar Boundary, Eileen C. Gonzales

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Complexities in the atmospheres of sources that straddle the boundary between low-mass stars and planets drive the spectral features we observe and the fundamental parameters that we derive. In an effort to understand the underlying cause of these spectral features, this work examines low-mass stars and brown dwarfs using two approaches: distance-calibrated spectral energy distributions (SEDs) and atmospheric retrievals. SEDs allow for the determination of semi-empirical fundamental parameters, while atmospheric retrievals allow us to derive the atmospheric structure and composition, as well as extrapolated fundamental parameters for a source. Low-metallicity and high surface gravity sources, known as subdwarfs, are the …


An Accurate Solution Of The Self-Similar Orbit-Averaged Fokker-Planck Equation For Core-Collapsing Isotropic Globular Clusters: Properties And Application, Yuta Ito Sep 2020

An Accurate Solution Of The Self-Similar Orbit-Averaged Fokker-Planck Equation For Core-Collapsing Isotropic Globular Clusters: Properties And Application, Yuta Ito

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Hundreds of dense star clusters exist in almost all galaxies. Each cluster is composed of approximately ten thousand through ten million stars. The stars orbit in the clusters due to the clusters' self-gravity. Standard stellar dynamics expects that the clusters behave like collisionless self-gravitating systems on short time scales (~ million years) and the stars travel in smooth continuous orbits. Such clusters temporally settle to dynamically stable states or quasi-stationary states (QSS). Two fundamental QSS models are the isothermal- and polytropic- spheres since they have similar structures to the actual core (central part) and halo (outskirt) of the clusters. The …