NOTE: This meeting will be in person at FURMAN UNIVERSITY, not at the Science Center. Location and Map are listed below:
For most of my life, I assumed that the main job of an astronomer was to look through a telescope in search of stars and planets. After all, most of astronomy is exactly that: collecting light that has traveled across space for years, centuries, or even millions or billions of years to test our understanding of the universe and discover what remains unknown.
The study of presolar grains is a different kind of astronomy. It is not one that waits for light to come to us, but instead relies on pieces of stars that are in our laboratories today. The journey of one of these grains is much longer than the light we receive from telescopes. The grains form in the outflows of dying stars, spend on the order of 100 million years in the interstellar medium, then are incorporated into our solar system. Most of these grains would mix together and eventually become the Sun, Earth, and even our own bodies. However, some of these grains lived on as unaltered pieces of stars inside of small, stony asteroids that would later fall to Earth as meteorites to be examined in the lab.
The story of presolar grains is a story of a new astronomy going only back to the 1960s when chemists were preparing to study lunar samples. It is a story of the violent deaths of stars and the new elements created within. Through them we can learn not only about the origins of our solar system, but also about the fundamental nuclear physics and complex dynamics of how stars live and die.
Lucas Walls is a Ph.D. student in Physics and Astronomy at Clemson University, where he works with Prof. Bradley Meyer studying how stars forge the elements in violent events like supernovae. His research focuses on presolar grains—tiny grains of stardust found in meteorites that formed before the Solar System—and what they can tell us about how stars live and die.
We will meet in a classroom in Plyler Hall 222 in the Townes Science Center. Visitors can park in the South Chapel Lot, which is the parking lot between the Daniel Chapel and the football stadium (park closer to the chapel side – see attached map, follow the red arrow). The building is across the Mall from the parking lot. The classroom is on the second floor; there is stair and elevator access near the classroom.