NASA provides UNG professor funding to discover what is inside stars

Dr. Gregory Feiden was a physics major at the State University of New York at Oswego, when he was intrigued by an astrophysics class taught by a popular professor on campus.

"Astrophysics wasn't really on my radar until I took that class," Feiden said. "I really enjoyed the course; you could describe a star's entire life with just a few simple equations."

That class led to doctoral degree in astrophysics at Dartmouth College and a postdoctoral research fellowship at Uppsala University in Sweden. For the last two years, Feiden has been an assistant professor of astronomy at the University of North Georgia (UNG).

Recently, Feiden was awarded funding as a co-investigator on a research grant proposal through NASA's Research Opportunities in Space and Earth Sciences (ROSES) Astrophysics Theory Program.

The proposal, titled "Insights into Globular Cluster Multiple Populations from Self-Consistent Stellar Models," was recently awarded $415,797 in funding, with Feiden receiving a $63,293 sub-award.

Feiden is interested in what goes on inside stars to produce the properties that astronomers can measure — brightness, color, surface temperature, and size. His research involves developing advanced computer models of stellar interiors, in part to explore the buildup of helium between different generations of stars in globular clusters. By studying these different populations within globular clusters, astronomers believe they can reconstruct the Milky Way's formation history.