we sayyyy we are all made of star stuff, but how do we really know that’s true?
it all comes back to sunshine & rainbows🌈 (ok, starlight and spectra but you get my point)
starting to share more things on my ig!! theastrozo
![pink striped background with purple text “how can we tell what stars are made of?
Plot of the Eu 4129 line from my 2026 paper showing an Eu detection of 0.57. There are cutouts that read “these black dots are our data points. The points at ~0.95 represent the background “rainbow” of our star” and “these back dots down here [~0.85] are our Eu absorption line”
“This is how stellar astronomers typically visualize the spectra of stars,with flux (the amount of light) on the y axis, and wavelength (unit of distance) on the x axis”](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:zsvhvmyp7vx3kt27tk56adyy/bafkreigu3oktbzg7rbtswfgz6lwmvm3nplm2brwvjl35endi5a6mo3saqu)
zoë hackshaw
@theastrozo.bsky.social
178 followers 76 following 36 posts
UTAustin Astronomy Ph.D. candidate & investigator of Galactic origins🔎💫🔭🧘♀️🤠🪩 ig: theastrozo 🫶🏼 zoehackshaw.github.io
![The [α/Fe] – [Fe/H] planes, where α elements include Mg, Si, Ca, and Ti. Violin shaped symbols indicate GC stars from APOGEE (Meszaros et al. 2020), including the average [Fe/H], maximum and minimum [α/Fe] of each GC. In-situ GCs are colored light green, while accreted GCs are light red. Orange circles correspond to Sagittarius (Hasselquist et al. 2017; Hayes et al. 2020). Blue circles represent stars from Sculptor (Hill et al. 2019).](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:cugc4wn2mruqtvx7lm2kztiy/bafkreifcm6p7bhyucvzybsdammt5trc6usunw55nsye5v4ndxbfr5hmp6i)
![Top panel: two-dimensional number density of a sample of giants in Gaia DR3 crossmatched with APOGEE DR17 that spanned a Galactocentric range of 4-16 kpc (see text for details). The red dashed lines delimit the thick disc/bridge/low-α regions used to derive the kinematic properties in Table 2, while the excluded region for this derivation is shaded red. Middle panel: two-dimensional number density of star disc particles, as identif ied by GMM, in the [Mg/Fe] vs. [Fe/H] plane. Green, blue and purple mark the contours containing 90% of the high-α, bridge and low-α disc stars, respectively. Bottom panel: Mean age distribution of disc stars in the same plane, with the black contour enclosing the region containing 90% of the star particles in the disc. The last two panels show disc star particles at z ∼ 0.1.](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:cugc4wn2mruqtvx7lm2kztiy/bafkreie5sxvxf6shi4i57zb2p3lzehagettntmp5o5mj7cxk4sgu2zpfqy)
