This area focuses on the study of stars and stellar for a variety of applications. Among these applications we highlight stellar evolution, in particular transients and supernova events. We are heavily involved in projects such as ASSA-SN and XX to detect and study different transient events in the Universe. Supernovae are interesting because they represent the death of stars, but also because they interact with their surroundings, affecting the evolution of galaxies. Since they are very bright, we can use supernovae to study properties of galaxies beyond the Milky Way. We also focus on the studies of stellar atmospheres, in particular determination of stellar parameters and chemical abundances of thousands of stars. This information is then used to study stellar populations of the Milky Way and neighboring galaxies to reconstruct, using their chemical compositions as fossil records, the formation and evolution of spiral galaxies. Thanks to SDSS-V, in particular the combination between the Milky Way Mapper and the Local Volume Mapper, new avenues to combine the information from stellar spectra and the chemistry of the ISM in the Milky Way will revolutionize our understanding of how galaxies like our own assemble. Our expertise in the analysis of both, high resolution stellar spectra from e.g. MIKE, UVES, APOGEE, or high-quality IFU data from e.g. MUSE, has brought us to lead important working groups in both, the Milky Way Mapper and the Local Volume Mapper. Other topics of interest in this area are compact objects, binary stars, variable stars, dwarf galaxies, and metal-poor stars.
Projects
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AI-Powered Modeling of Stellar Atmospheres
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History and evolution of the interacting Sagittarius dwarf spheroidal galaxy and its stellar populations.
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Characterizing the Environments and Occurrence Rates of Core-Collapse Supernovae
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Progenitors stars, Explosion and Powering mechanisms of Supernovae and other Explosive Transients
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Galactic Phylogenetics
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The Gaia Benchmark Stars