Hungry Stars: Modelling Planetary Accretion onto Stellar Atmospheres
By: Lauren Little
Department: Physics
Faculty Advisor: Dr. John Brewer
Stellar clusters are generally considered to be chemically homogenous due to their common formation location, however there have been members that stray significantly from the average cluster metallicity. A possible explanation of these outliers is planetary engulfment, an event where a star with a planet accretes the planetary material into its atmosphere. We are modelling planetary accretion events in detail for late F and early G type dwarf stars using MESA (Modules for Experiments in Stellar Astrophysics), which should provide a baseline for the expected signals that could be observed hundreds of mega-years after the event has happened. We will use these models to evaluate cluster data of three open clusters and some binary stars observed with Keck HIRES to provide a potential resolution to these inconsistencies in metallicity.