A Welcome & Introduction of my Senior Project

Hello, wonderful reader, and welcome to my first blog post! I'm Rena, and over the next few months, I will be using this blog to keep track and update you on the progress of my senior project.

My senior project will aim to find the chemical composition and true ages of star clusters formed through the collisions of galaxies. This first blog post will mostly be context and background information that my senior project will build off of.

First off, galaxy collisions are not violent–in fact, they are rather graceful, dancing and swirling around each other as their center of masses are gradually shifted towards each other. (If you're wondering about our lovely Milky Way galaxy, don't worry! We won't be colliding with Andromeda for another 4 billion years.) Here are some key terms to know:

• Star Cluster: a group of stars bound by gravity

• Globular Cluster: a subset of star clusters, these clusters are tightly bound by gravity leading to its spherical shape and have denser cores

• Open Cluster: these clusters are loosely bound by gravity, so they have no obvious shape and may easily lose stars to larger globular clusters

• Stellar Evolution: the life cycle of a star or how a star changes over time

• Nuclear Fusion: the process that powers a star through collisions of protons

In my next blog post, I'll be tell you more about the process of my project and why it matters (pun intended). If you have any questions, please comment or drop me an email, and thanks for reading! :)