Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

Massive stars have effects on their surroundings by providing energy via their radiation fields, winds, and by supernova explosions, and they supply heavy elements, the building blocks of planetary systems. My research focuses on particular types of massive stars surrounded by disk-like distributions of material in order to understand how these disks form, and the effects these systems have on their surroundings. These investigations include young stars that have disks formed from material left over from birth, and on more evolved stars that have disks formed from material released from the star itself. Specifically, I construct computer models of these disk-star systems. My models predict particular details in the light, such as spectral energy distributions and spectral line profiles, that come from these objects, and then these predictions are compared with actual observations. These comparisons allow me to decipher the physical conditions surrounding these stars, such as temperature, density, geometry, and wind speed, so that I can try to understand what processes form and maintain these disk-like regions. My models allow observations of these systems from international observatories, such as the US Naval optical interferometer in Arizona, European Southern Observatory's infrared interferometer, and NASA's ultraviolet orbiting satellite to be interpreted correctly. This research allows the true physical conditions in these disks to be determined, and will ultimately lead to the development of realistic dynamical models for these systems.