PI: Verne Smith INSTITUTION: University of Texas, El Paso
Dr. Smith, in this collaborative project with Dr. Jon Holtzman of New Mexico State University (AST-0307393), will carry out a multi-faceted project that will lead to improved understanding of the star formation of the Milky Way Galaxy. Their approach will combine two widely used techniques to strengthen the conclusions that one could draw from the application of either separately. They will investigate the star formation history of the solar neighborhood by creating a homogeneous database of high-resolution spectroscopic observations, and the abundances derived from it, for a volume-limited sample of evolved stars in the Hipparcos catalog, and combine this abundance information with the color-magnitude diagram. They will then develop models of galactic chemical evolution which are constrained by both this star formation history and the detailed abundance profiles. They also plan to investigate the star formation history of the Galactic bulge by a similar technique of combining information on stellar metallicity with color-magnitude diagrams. They will make available to the community the database of both observations and abundances for their sample. They also work closely with both undergraduate and graduate students at their institutions.
