Static and dynamic spherical stellar atmospheres applied to optical interferometry

恒星的定量研究一直是天体物理学的主要成功之一，由于恒星表面成像的变革性改进，它正在向更高的水平过渡，测量恒星亮度到百万分之一，并确定恒星距离到1%。 为了解释这些数据，我们已经开发了一个强大的计算机程序来表示球形恒星的大气特征的三个基本参数：光度，质量和半径。 利用现有的光度和半径数据，我们能够推导出单个恒星的质量，这对星星的年龄提出了有意义的限制。 我们正在扩展这一计算机程序，以纳入径向脉动，以便将其应用于重要的造父变星，这是必不可少的测量银河系以外的距离。 这些数值模型将使我们对造父变星有更深入的了解，并使我们能够研究我们以前的分析结果，即脉动驱动造父变星的质量，影响我们对这些恒星生命史的观测和解释。

The quantitative study of stars has been one of the major successes of astrophysics, and it is transitioning to even higher levels thanks to tranformative improvements in imaging stellar surfaces, measuring stellar brightnesses to 1 part per million and determining stellar distances to a fraction of 1%. To interpret these data, we have developed a robust computer program to represent spherical stellar atmospheres characterized by their three fundamental parameters: luminosity, mass and radius. Using existing data for luminosities and radii, we are able to derive the masses of single stars, which puts meaningful limits on the star's age. We are extending this computer program to incorporate radial pulsation in order to apply it to the important Cepheid variable stars, which are essential for measuring distances beyond the Milky Way. These numerical models will give us a much deeper understanding of the Cepheid variables, as well as enabling us to investigate our previous analytic result that pulsation drives mass from Cepheids, affecting both the observations and our interpretation of the life histories of these stars.