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MODEST Working Group 10:
Outreach


Simply put, the goal of MODEST is to understand the beautiful, diverse, and often enigmatic star clusters of nature. Here we provide links to popular short summaries, informative and attractive pictures and animations, and press release type statements of work relevant to MODEST. The hope is that journalists, students, or anyone wishing to learn more about our endeavors will find this page to be a useful springboard into the ocean of exciting background information and recent research.


Contact: James Lombardi

Jump to: Astronomy Pictures of the Day | Articles | Visualizations | Computing | Educational Fun

Astronomy Pictures of the Day

Astronomy Picture of the Day (APOD) is a NASA website that presents beautiful astronomy images or photographs, accompanied with informative hypertext explanations. These links to APOD pages help showcase the beauty of the astrophysical systems pertinent to MODEST.

Globular Clusters
Definition, history, and links
Editor's choices for most educational APODs

Open Clusters
Definition, history, and links
Editor's choices for most educational APODs

Stellar Exotica
Blue Stragglers in Globular Cluster 47 Tucanae
Blue Stragglers in Globular Cluster NGC 6397

Articles

Press Releases
The Formation of Stars and Brown Dwarfs and the Truncation of Protoplanetary Discs in a Star Cluster (April 12, 2002)
Star Cluster with Surprising Similarities to Sun's Composition Offers Clues on Milky Way Evolution (June 3, 2002)
Researchers Seek "Heart" of Black Hole Mystery (January 10, 2003)
Close Encounters of the Stellar Kind (July 30, 2003)

Popular Articles
The Star Machine (Discover 18, No. 6, 76-83, 1997): about the GRAPE hardware
Two Stars Collide; A New Star Is Born (NYT, June 13, 2000): about "Stellar Collisions, Mergers, and Their Consequences" conference (subscription required)
Star Formation (special issue of Science magazine, January 4, 2002): how stars and star clusters are born (subscription required)
When Stars Collide (feature article in Scientific American, November 2002): about all types of stellar collisions (subscription required)
Black Holes in the Middle: Massive Stars Merge (cover story in Astronomy magazine, March 2004): runaway collisions may be responsible for massive black holes (subscription required)

Reviews
MODEST-1: Integrating Stellar Evolution and Stellar Dynamics: the first few sections give a nice overview of MODEST

Visualizations

Star Formation
The formation of a small star cluster

Star Clusters
30 Doradus system
Sample animations created with the Starlab toolset

Stellar Interactions and Phenomena
Stellar collisions: by Joshua Barnes
Stellar collision between high mass stars: by James Lombardi and students

Computing

The following links are for those who want to learn more about the computing that goes into modelling dense stellar systems. The software links are primarily intended for students with some programming experience, while the web interface links are for anyone who wants to initiate online simulations immediately.

Software
The Art of Computational Science: a series of books centered around N-body simulations.
Make Me A Star: a package for generating stellar collision products
McScatter: a program for integrating binary evolution with stellar dynamics
NEMO: a stellar dynamics toolbox
Starlab: a powerful unix toolbox for simulating stellar systems

Web Interfaces
Binary evolution: with the Scenario Machine
Binary evolution: with SeBa

Educational Fun

Foldable paper cube of star cluster simulations


Last modified: May 2013