Hypatia Catalog - Solar Neighborhood Is Not A Mixed Salad, It's A Layered One
Tuesday, August 19, 2014 - 11:00
in Astronomy & Space
The Hypatia Catalog is the largest catalog ever produced for stellar compositions and seeks to help in understanding the properties of stars, how they form, and possible connections with orbiting planets. Named after one of the first female astronomers, who lived ~350 A.D. in Alexandria, the digital catalog is a compilation of spectroscopic abundance data from 84 literature sources for 50 elements across 3,058 stars in the solar neighborhood, within 500 light years of the Sun. It essentially lists the compositions of stars, but only stars that are like the Sun – or F-, G-, or K-type (the Sun is a G-type star) – that are relatively near to the Sun. read more