Anmol Desai SURF SMART
Investigating Stellar Mass vs. Rotation Period Using K2 Space Telescope
The K2 telescope observed over half a million stars in the night sky. Some of these stars are in dense open clusters,” and all of the stars in an open cluster are assumed to be the same age. K2 generated composite images of these open clusters, and in this project we will analyze an open cluster called Ruprecht 147. The goal of this project is to measure how rapidly the stars in Ruprecht 147 are rotating and compare this to how massive they are. Then we will look at how this relationship between mass and rotation for the stars in Ruprecht 147 compares to those for other open clusters of different ages. This will tell us about how stellar populations change over time. The project involves generating time-series data from telescope images and searching for periodic signals in this data, querying a large database to extract stellar masses, and quantitatively defining the relationship between our variables.