Stars and dust: structure, composition and interaction

This project deals with stars and cosmic dust, important baryonic constituents of the

Universe. The interplay between dust, gas and stars is present throughout stellar

and Galactic evolution, from star and planet formation until ultimate final stages

in supernovae explosions. In the era of precision cosmology and of search for life

on other worlds, stellar astrophysics has become extremely relevant. We address

a number of important topics in the various stages of stellar evolution and interaction

of stars with their circumstellar and interstellar environment. Our principal objective

is probing stellar evolution models. With sophisticated methods of spectral disentangling

we pioneered and upgraded we are able to measure metallicity of the stars in binaries with

the high precision and breakdown the main obstacle in comparing empirical data to models.

We plan to analyse benchmark binary stars along the mass sequence to provide the stringent

tests of different stellar evolution models and parametrise efficiency of rotational mixing,

convective core overshooting or mixing length. Radiative transfer calculations in dusty

envelopes and protoplanetary disks, including MHD calculations in boundary star-disk

region would be performed with a high spatial resolution which is enabled by the code

LELUYA devolped by one of us. Ab initio quantum density functional theory calculations

would enable identifications and composition of interstellar dust nanoparicles from

IR and X-ray spectra obtained on-board space telescopes. This is is the first attempt

to organise dispersed astrophysical research in Croatia into more focused direction.

The research team is assembled with the Croatian scientist from 6 Croatian and 2 foreign

institutions including all the four major Croatian universities. We hope this would promote

collaborative research and make astro-physical research in the country more coherent and

better organised.