Dr. Hans Mueller, at Dartmouth College, will undertake a program to model regions carved into the local interstellar medium by the winds of cool main sequence stars in the Solar neighborhood. Comparison of these models to high-resolution Lyman-alpha absorption spectra and X-ray emission observations of gas near the cavity boundaries will then be made. The goal of the work is to add to our understanding of low-mass stellar winds, as well as the properties of the interstellar medium within a few parsecs of the Sun.
The project involves a graduate student and undergraduates, including first-year undergraduate student interns in the Women-in-Science-Project at Dartmouth College. In addition, the project contains multi-disciplinary elements, with space plasma physics methods being applied to astrophysical settings.
