Busy as ever, but progressing…

Its been over a month since my last post. Nothing special going on, its just I am in the middle of the nitty gritty analysis part of the projects I mentioned in the last post. My preliminary results were encouraging, however once you start to dip deeper, we see the other effects which require even further investigations. Its frustrating right now to keep re-analysing and double/triple checking everything, but once I have done this I will have a sound and accurate result. So later if someone challenges my results I can say that I already checked! 🙂

Hyades open star cluster in Taurus

The prognosis so far is that many of my sample stars do share the same chemical patterns which seem to match that of the Hyades Open cluster. Once I finish up on all the details of the analysis, showing that we can chemically identify lost stars of the Hyades will be a major result for this year – well, at least for me!

On other projects, the work dealing with BHBs and HBB is all done and published. The main results from that was showing how Open star clusters (like Hyades, Pleiades, etc) do not show some of the extreme chemical patterns seen in Globular clusters, which are more massive and dense clusters than the open clusters. These differences in the chemical patterns show that the two classes of objects formed in vastly different environments via different processes. In the figure below, the red symbols are open cluster stars and the green symbols are Globular cluster stars – the difference is the pattern is obvious…

This plot compares the sodium (Na) and oxygen (O) abundance of Open cluster stars (red) with Globular cluster stars (green). The black line is a theoretical model of what we expect from the Milky Way disk stars.