Welcome!

"Thus it is possible to say that you and your neighbor and I,
each one of us and all of us, are truly and literally a little bit of stardust."
- William Fowler



Stars like the Sun, and up to ten times as massive, end their lives as red giants with strong stellar winds slowly peeling their mass away. In the deep, hot layers of these stars nuclear reactions produce free neutrons. These are captured by iron nuclei to create the heavy elements up to lead, which are then carried to the stellar surface by convective mixing. In the external, cool layers of these stars large amounts of dust particles form, incorporating the products of the nuclear burning.

Our group was funded in November 2014 with the support of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences to investigate the nuclear burning deep inside giant stars, the production of dust in their external layers, and the impact of these processes on the cosmic chemistry of the Universe. Our work covers a large number of topic with far-reaching impact: We use stellar seismic observations to constrain the production of the elements heavier than iron, and investigate as yet unexplored neutron-capture conditions that may have produced unusual abundances of the elements heavier than iron in some of the oldest stars in our Galaxy. Using data from meteoritic stardust we plan to derive empirical laws of dust formation efficiency as a function of stellar properties. We combine stellar model predictions to spectroscopic data from stars in globular clusters, to understand the history of the different stellar populations present in these systems, and we use information from laboratory analysis of meteorites, to investigate the origin of cosmic radioactivity and the origin of the Solar System.