This week’s CARD was given by another member of staff, Joanne Bibby, who has been teaching and running outreach at UCLan for the last year, after a stint at the American Museum of National History in New York. Joanne’s research focusses strongly on large surveys of massive stars in nearby, grand-design spiral galaxies. These massive stars are classed as those larger than eight stellar masses, although they can originally be as big as 75 solar masses or more.
Once again, the talk was well attended by a combination of interns, PhD students and members of staff. Joanne dealt well with this mixed audience by giving an overview of the evolutionary models for Red Supergiant and Wolf-Rayet stars, as well as a description of some of the many different types of Supernovae. She explained the links currently thought to exist between the two stellar evolutionary points, highlighting the point that studying the spectrum of a supernova can identify what elements were no longer present in the progenitor. Additionally, she pointed out that although binaries can be linked to supernovae, differences in distributions within a galaxy of different types of supernovae indicate that they are not the sole progenitors.
Joanne’s talk was the second in the summer series lead by both staff and students. The timetable can be found here on the JHI webpage.