Completing the WIYN Speckle Survey: Toward the Thin and Thick Disk Binary Populations

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This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).In previous NSF-funded work, Dr. Horch and his group have developed a unique instrument for observing stars at high angular resolution. This project will use this instrument at the WIYN telescope in Arizona to complete an extensive survey of suspected and probable binary stars in various stellar populations of the Milky Way. The resulting data on the stellar mass-radius relation will provide many potential tests of stellar structure and evolution theory. The data will be used in combination with information from recent spectroscopic surveys, particularly the Geneva-Copenhagen Catalog, to make substantial progress in empirical knowledge of stellar astrophysics as well as galactic structure and evolution. In combination with existing and forthcoming spectroscopic survey data, robust comparisons between the observations and stellar evolution models can be completed with many binary systems. Importantly, the new data will permit the measurement of such quantities such as the system age and the helium abundance. Dr. Horch will also create a regular series of physics and astronomy seminars in the Department of Physics at Southern Connecticut State University (SCSU). He will work work with high school physics teachers in the area and with the well-established Physics Club at SCSU to help promote careers in science to underrepresented groups in Connecticut through these talks. The advising of undergraduate Physics students at SCSU through the proposed work will help serve the need for highly-trained, research-capable science and engineering professionals in the U.S.