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>> I am looking at stellar evolution models, which are computer models of stars that take all
of the equations and physics that we know that are going inside of starts.
We kind of put them together and take a star from life until death.
My search is focused on beginning to answer the philosophical question of whether
or not we are alone in the universe.
So, it's a very big physical daunting question that seems to be on the mind of a lot of people.
It turns out that all of these exo-planet missions or solar planet missions
that we are using to kind of look for the next earth elsewhere in the universe can't tell us
that much about the actual planet.
They can tell us about the planet with respect to the start that it's around.
And without actual information about the star that it's around we are clueless as to figure
out what's going on with that planet.
And the only way to get information about the star, knowing very little about the star
that we do from observations is through the use of the star evolution models.
We can take something just as simple as the mass of the star and with the mass
of that star we can tell you almost all of the properties that you will need to know
about the star and subsequently the planet, the most important one of which is whether
or not liquid water can exist on the surface of the planet.
It's very dependent upon the energy output from the star.
So, if you have a very energetic star that's outputting just a lot of light.
You have to further away, otherwise you're just going to vaporize all the water.
If you have a very cool star, which is an M-dwarf,
you have to have the planet be very close.
And M-dwarf models are by far some of the worst in terms of the errors that we have noticed
between what we can pick out and other systems and what the models actually predict.
And so, what we're looking at doing is coming in and fixing some of these issues
so that we don't have to worry about that.
[Background Music] One of the leading theories is
that magnetic fields can actually alter the interior structure of a star
and that is where my research picks up.
And adding new physics into these models we're going
to add the supposed effects of the magnetic field.
Maybe one day we can have an understanding of space weather
and how the sun affects the near earth environment which can alter communications.
You know it can destroy satellites and we would hope to find
that our models would be more accurate so we have a better chance of finding out whether
or not there are any planets that can support liquid water out there in the universe.
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