G6004: Student Presentations


All students will give a short (20 min) presentation during the last two weeks of class, on a topic of your choice.  These talks are design to give you the opportunity to explore some aspect of stellar structure and evolution that is of interest to you.  This could be an investigation into a related topic that we did not touch on at all in the class, or a more in-depth look at a subject that we did cover.  The level of presentation should be similar to a typical lecture, but please keep in mind that 20 minutes is quite short, so prepare well in advance.  Also, please keep your topic fairly specific -- a general review of a wide area (e.g. star formation) is not as useful as an in-depth look at a particular area (e.g. observations of protostellar outflows).  A list of possible topics is given below, but please do not limit yourself to this list.  Let me know your choice of topic by Nov 16.

An incomplete list of possible presentation topics:
  1. Some aspect of star formation: e.g., the origin of the IMF, turbulent star formation, massive star formation, protostellar jets, observations of protostellar objects, etc.
  2. Binary star evolution (lots and lots of good topics here)
  3. Planet formation (lots of possible topics here)
  4. Stellar winds: e.g., how are they driven, how are they observed
  5. What future space missions will tell us about stellar structure (e.g., Gaia)
  6. Relativistic stellar structure
  7. Magnetars
  8. Numerical integration of the stellar structure equations
  9. How rotation affects stellar structure
  10. Detailed nuclear synthesis
  11. Electron shielding
  12. Neutrino detection
  13. Historical review of stellar structure
  14. Stellar collisions
  15. Neutron stars
  16. Black hole accretion
  17. Accretion disks
  18. The solar cycle
  19. Helioseismology
  20. PN formation
The current order for students talks is:

Neil Nov 30
Taka Nov 30
Kathryn Nov 30 or Dec 5
Cameron Dec 5
Emily Dec 5
Maureen Dec 5 or later
Duane Dec 7


So far (Nov 21/06) the following topics have been chosen: