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Tom Wagg

@tomwagg.bsky.social
215 followers 103 following 21 posts

Astro PhD student at UW | Harvard '20 | I love binary stars, galactic dynamics, gravitational waves (LISA!) and writing open-source tools | 🏑 field hockey & 🧗 rock climbing outside of astro tomwagg.com - github.com/TomWagg

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Tom Wagg @tomwagg.bsky.social · 12/09/2024
Speaking of visualisations, tired of interpreting evolutionary tables full of numbers? Use cogsworth to make your life easier and simply dynamically generate a cartoon evolution diagram for any binary in your simulation, and quickly plot it's orbit through the galaxy.
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Tom Wagg @tomwagg.bsky.social · 12/09/2024
cogsworth also comes equipped and ready to transform intrinsic distributions to observables by applying dust maps, bolometric correction functions and selection functions to your simulations. You can directly produce a CMD of your populations with one simple function!
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Tom Wagg @tomwagg.bsky.social · 12/09/2024
You can even start a cogsworth simulation based on a hydrodynamical zoom-in simulation, sampling clustered populations and fitting a potential to the galactic mass distribution. We currently support any FIRE-2 or ChaNGa galaxy, here's an example from FIRE m11h!
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Tom Wagg @tomwagg.bsky.social · 12/09/2024
Want to define your own custom star formation like the plot below? cogsworth supports it! Want to change a myriad of binary physics assumptions? cogsworth has you covered! Curious how your systems evolve in different galactic potentials? cogsworth can tell you!
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Tom Wagg @tomwagg.bsky.social · 12/09/2024
Where did every supernova in a given galaxy happen? Where are the r-process enrichment sites? cogsworth can not only simulate all of this, but also demonstrate how your results change for different assumptions about star formation, binary physics and the galactic environment!
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Tom Wagg @tomwagg.bsky.social · 12/09/2024
The core purpose of cogsworth is to make predictions for the positions and kinematics of massive stars and compact objects. Both binary evolution and galactic dynamics strongly affect these parameters - and so they have a lot of constraining potential!
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Tom Wagg @tomwagg.bsky.social · 12/03/2024
We show how this means that one could potentially infer an incorrect mass or central hydrogen abundance for a star if you assume it is a single star when in reality it has accreted mass. The posteriors are extremely multi-modal so care needs to be taken in fitting.
Chi^2 distribution for fitting our accretor model with a single star grid in mass and central hydrogen fraction
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Tom Wagg @tomwagg.bsky.social · 12/03/2024
This has a strong effect on the observed period spacing pattern of an accretor star. Pulsation modes that are sensitive to the region with an altered structure show shifts in both period and amplitude compared to an equivalent single star. (e.g. look at the Xc=0.1 panel between 1.5 and 3 days)
Period spacing pattern of an accretor star and equivalent single star
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Tom Wagg @tomwagg.bsky.social · 12/03/2024
We used MESA & GYRE to simulate the asteroseismic signals of a 3Msol star that accretes mass from a 4Msol binary companion (~the mass range of Slowly Pulsating B stars). Here’s an HRD of their evolution (accretor highlighted in green).
Hertzsprung-Russel diagram of an interacting binary
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Tom Wagg @tomwagg.bsky.social · 12/03/2024
Paper day today! 🎉 So excited to share this work investigating how mass transfer leaves imprints on the asteroseismic signals of a star: arxiv.org/abs/2403.05627. More in the thread below! 🧵
Hertzsprung-Russell diagram of an interacting binary
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