Following a period in which instances of in-person conferences have been rare, physics Ph.D. student Olivia McAuley presented at the Flatiron Institute鈥檚 Center for Computational Astrophysics in New York this summer, with an invited talk on how and why an approximately eight-billion-year-old cluster of stars still exists in our Milky Way galaxy. In her talk for the "Dynamics Day," Olivia explained how these stars can be affected if they reside at a particular stable point, called a Lagrange point.
Olivia presented her talk during the morning. After this, there was an opportunity for the attendees to both discuss and raise questions regarding their research findings among a group of peers.
"I study the orbital changes of the stars by looking at the action angles. I am currently in the process of adding a cluster to my simulation that is located at this Lagrange point and putting the cluster in different environments to see what happens to the orbits of these stars."
Congratulations to Olivia for the prestigious invitation and a successful talk!