Seminar: Stellar Benchmarks and a Few Things to Do With Them

The coming decades will see stellar parameters like temperature, radius, and metallicity produced for many millions of new stars as part of both current and upcoming massive stellar surveys. However, for any new insights into stellar or Galactic physics to reach their full potential, these parameters need to be calibrated by a library of benchmark stars whose properties are as fundamental and model independent as possible. Such a library allows separate surveys to be put on the same fundamental scale, and is particularly important for challenging regions of the parameter space where models are more uncertain. In this talk I give an overview of my PhD research to broaden our library of stellar benchmarks, as well as how I have used such benchmarks to calibrate a spectroscopic survey of low-mass stars and constrain exoplanet demographics.

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We will take the speaker to lunch, leaving from 95404Å at 12:15. There will be fika after the seminar.