Dinner With a Star: Stellar Engulfment of Exoplanet Systems

A PAS invited talk by Ashlyn Leary, Lehigh University

About the Talk
Ms. Leary will describe how she utilizes MESA to model the evolution of stars and compares her results to known exoplanet systems to predict if/when host stars will swallow their planets, assuming no further dynamical evolution of the systems. She will discuss her current findings, along with an analysis of arising patterns and their implications.

About Our Speaker
Ashlyn Leary is pursuing a B.S. in Astrophysics, a B.A. in Sociology, and a minor in Data Science at Lehigh University. At Lehigh, she has the opportunity to design and execute her research project on planetary engulfment under the guidance of Prof. McSwain. Ms. Leary presented a poster of this research at the 245th Meeting of the American Astronomical Society, and has published a research note on it titled, “Dinner with a Star: Stellar Engulfment of Exoplanet Systems." This summer, Ms. Leary began contributing to a physics education research project under the direction of Prof. Leblond, through the Sustainable Physics NSF REU at Penn State, and she plans to continue this research. In addition to pursuing astrophysics, she is a singer, songwriter and performer, trained in classical, acoustic and electrical guitar. She is enthusiastic about continually finding creative ways to combine and pursue passions in art, sociology and physics.

Meeting Logistics
The speaker will be remote, and the meeting is hybrid: in-person at Los Altos Library and on Zoom. Zoom details to be provided before the meeting.
Meeting brings at 7:00 PM.