Eric Raymer from North Carolina State University gave a terrific introduction to eclipsing binary stars in our November indoor meeting. The presentation started with the basics of what eclipsing binaries are, how we detect them, and showed some of the latest research going on at NCSU.
Eric is graduate student in the NCSU Physics department and was recently awarded a NC Space Grant Fellowship for his research. He is working on developing a large scale hydrodynamic simulation of accretion disks in phenomena like eclipsing binaries and other types of star systems.
He demonstrated some of the results of the models that they had done, as well as provided a very good background on why these simulations are being done and what we hope to learn. He also briefly discussed the large scale computing facility that they use in oak ridge to run the simulations that uses almost 113,000 processors!
