News: Website created: 12.11.2019

Stars are the building blocks of galaxies, and so it is crucial to understand how they are formed and how they evolve. The physical processes at work inside a star strongly impact its lifespan, and its energy and chemical feedback to the interstellar medium. Modern observations have revealed the interior rotation rates of stars for different masses and evolutionary stages. Specifically, the vast majority of main sequence stars have been inferred to be approximately rigid-body rotators. Furthermore, stars lose a large amount of angular momentum during their lives, which means that an efficient transport mechanism must exist within stellar interiors. However, current prescriptions for angular momentum theory in stellar models are unable to reproduce these observations.

In the EAS2020 special session: New insights of angular momentum transport in stellar interiors, we will bring together junior and senior scientists from observational, hydrodynamical modelling and theoretical backgrounds. During the special session, we will focus on the synergy of how recent work is being used to calibrate angular momentum theory and improve stellar evolution codes.

Programme

Oral and poster contributions will be accepted under the following themes:

• Observations of stellar interiors
• Improving stellar evolution models
• Constraining angular momentum transport inside stars

Invited speakers

• Richard Townsend (University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA)
• Rhita-Maria Ouazzani (LESIA, Observatoire de Paris, France)
• Stéphane Mathis (AIM, Université Paris-Saclay, France)

Scientific organisers

Dominic Bowman (chair; KU Leuven, Belgium), Corinne Charbonnel (co-chair; University of Geneva, Switzerland), Tamara Rogers (Newcastle University, UK), Falk Herwig (University of Victoria, Canada), Friedrich Roepke (Heidelberg Institute for Theoretical Studies, Germany).

Contact

Dominic Bowman (dominic.bowman @ kuleuven.be)