PhD position: Stellar Rotation

Most massive stars are born rotating at a significant fraction of their “break-up” velocity, typically about 40%.  As stars evolve, the inner parts contract and the outer parts expand, or are even blown away by stellar winds.  Hydrodynamical instabilities, magnetic files, sound and gravity waves, and convective motions can re-distribute angular momentum.  Whereas there is some observational data on low-mass evolved stars, the state of internal rotation massive stars is still largely unknown, despite the potential large impact on how they might explode; we only observe the some of the remnants they make, but that could be largely modified by the explosion itself.  How angular momentum is transported by the different processes in detail and how they may interact is far from clear.

We invite applications for a PhD project to model the action of stellar rotation and angular momentum transport in detail, including implications on stellar nucleosynthesis.  This also includes aspects of rotation due to the star formation process of massive stars.

References

Heger et al https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2000ApJ…528..368H/abstract

Heger et al. https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2005ApJ…626..350H/abstract