The topic of my work is the theory of evolution of massive stars
- in particular, the evolution of massive stars in
low-metallicity environments. These can probe how, many billions of years ago, massive stars
in the early universe lived and died, which is relevant for many
astrophysical phenomena. Examples are gravitational waves,
superluminous supernovae and gamma-ray bursts.
To better understand these stars, we have made
evolutionary models for massive stars in the Small Magellanic
Cloud (SMC), a sattelite galaxy of the Milky Way that is such a low-metallicity
environment.
One of the main goals of this work is to probe important internal mixing processes
in these stars (such as convective overshooting and rotational and
semiconvective mixing). Also, we have done an effort to provide a complete picture
of massive stars in the SMC, where we found a surprisingly low number of bright and young ones.
Links:
‣ A census of OBe stars in nearby dwarf galaxies reveals a high fraction of extreme rotators
‣ A dearth of young and bright massive stars in the Small Magellanic Cloud
‣ Constraining mixing in massive stars in the Small Magellanic Cloud
‣ Wolf-Rayet stars in the Small Magellanic Cloud as testbed for massive star evolution
Some of the evolutionary models discussed in the publications above are available online.
‣ SMC evolutionary models with different mixing efficiencies (mixing paper)
Abel Schootemeijer
+49 228 73 5084
aschoot@astro.uni-bonn.de
Raum 2.009