Congratulations to Dr. Kristin Brady, who successfully completed the defense of her Ph.D. dissertation in early June. Kristin’s dissertation involves three major project using infrared spectroscopy on problems in stellar astrophysics. First, Kristin analyzed the spectra of blue straggler stars in the star cluster Messier 67 to look for evidence of their origins. Next, Kristin determined the abundance of the element fluorine in Milky Way thick disk stars to compare to its abundance in the thin disk. Finally, Kristin determined the abundance of fluorine in a sample of carbon stars to test the hypothesis that fluorine is produced during the evolution of asymptotic giant branch stars.
Kristin’s research paper on fluorine in the Galactic disk recently appeared in the Astronomical Journal. In this work, she and collaborators present fluorine and sodium abundances in normal K giants belonging to the Galactic thin and thick disks using spectra obtained with the Phoenix infrared spectrometer on the 2.1 m telescope at Kitt Peak. She and her collaborators find a larger dispersion in fluorine abundances than sodium abundances despite both species having similar overall uncertainties due to atmospheric parameters. Her results suggest this dispersion is real rather than observational, and she compares the observed fluorine abundances to theoretical models for the production of fluorine in the Milky Way.
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