Some preliminary results

I have been extremely busy the past couple of weeks. In an earlier post in April I said I will try to get a past data set studied and written up into a article in a few months. Well since that post, two months have passed and things have been moving along. I do have some “preliminary” results now, but still along way to go to finish up the project.

These first results are encouraging. What I am studying are a bunch of stars that we think were born together in a cluster, but now have “left home” and are located at different places within our Galaxy’s disk. A sure sigh that they really were originally from the same cluster, is if they have the same chemical make up. My first results show that this may be the case, although there are some stars in my sample that show different chemical levels. At this stage I cannot tell if that is because they are random stars not from the same cluster or if they were originally cluster stars, but something has changed their chemical levels after they went wondering out. There are some tests I can do to check this, and this is the next goal of the project.

Of course in the meantime number of other things keep turning up that needs immediate attention, while the main project work gets postponed every time! Next week for example, here at ESO we will have the ESO Fellows Symposium. We will hear talks from all ESO fellows both based here in Garching and from Chile, so it is a good opportunity to discuss our science results. It is also a time to reflect on the Fellowship program and discuss any related matters. So now I should go a prepare my presentation!