COLLOQUIUM Sydney Barnes, AIP Potsdam

Stellar rotation as a pathway towards a Chronology of the Galaxy

With the exception of the `wandering' planets and the occasional nova or comet, the stars have historically been considered to be unchanging. But with the identification of distinctive stellar populations by Baade and others, and the development of realistic evolutionary stellar models, it became evident that certain stars, are very old, while others are only just forming. As a consequence, and in a curious parallellism with the geological conception of the Earth and its rocks as having changed, the Galaxy has become a dynamic arena instead of a static background. This view has accelerated in recent years, with the possibility of deriving ages not just for clusters of stars, but for individual field stars, including the cool main sequence types, whose classical properties are again almost changeless. This talk will present one way of obtaining such ages, via their rotation rates, and discuss the extent to which this method, called gyrochronology, could contribute in due course to the construction of a Chronology of the Galaxy.

Talk in presence and via Zoom:

https://uni-hamburg.zoom.us/j/66006535328?pwd=aGkrSjJIYmZjK0VpYlpGL0ZrdHg2UT09