Primordial vs. In Situ Abundance Variations in Red Giant Stars
Professor Don Terndrup (Astronomy)
Cayman Unterborn (Astronomy)
Globular clusters are extremely dense balls of some of the oldest stars in the Galaxy. As the clusters age, nuclear fusion processes produce metals inside of the component stars. Spectral observations, however, show unexpected abundances of these metals. Two theories, which are not necessarily mutually exclusive, provide explanations of these observed abundance anomalies. Convective currents may dredge up metals from the nuclear processing region or a progenitor star might pollute the star-forming region with its preprocessed metals. We examined a collection of globular clusters that may shed light on the contribution of these two theories