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Carl Sagan aptly noted, "we are all made of star stuff." This project delves deep into understanding how stars create elements, contributing to unraveling the mysteries surrounding the origins of elements by extracting and tracing the element compositions of millions of stars using cutting-edge spectroscopic surveys.

Objectives:

• Get to know, apply, and develop state-of-the-art spectroscopic tools, incorporating advanced neural networks, to infer chemical compositions from high-resolution spectra.
• Utilise the HERMES spectrograph at the Anglo-Australian Telescope as well as spectra of the 4MOST, and Gaia RVS/XP surveys to extract elemental abundances from millions of stars, including binary stars.
• Employ a holistic analysis approach, combining stellar spectroscopy with photometry, asteroseismology, and astrometry.
• Trace and quantify the enrichment of over 30 elements through various channels such as supernovae explosions using empirical models, semi-empirical models, and machine learning such as KPM or Chempy. Research Questions: - What are the optimal methods for inferring elemental abundances accurately and precisely from various spectra? - How can elemental abundances of binary stars be extracted, considering the prevalence of stars in binaries?
• Which specific processes and contributions are essential to explain the observed abundance patterns of the periodic table?
• Bonus: What can we infer about the origins of the diffuse interstellar bands hidden in the residuals of stellar spectra?

The project is part of a DECRA project and includes a travel budget for attending international and national conferences and workshops to establish your network within the astronomical community, including a research exchanges to key collaborators of the 4MOST survey in Germany and Sweden. You will have the opportunity to gather stellar spectra with Australia's largest optical telescope, the AAT, through guaranteed observing runs. There are plenty of opportunities to explore domains outside pure astronomy research such as outreach, professional and coding training as well as institute/industry exchanges through secondments that I am encouraging you to consider. You would join a growing diverse junior research group in observational stellar/Galactic astronomy with at least half the members identifying as female.

At the end of the project, you will have acquired advanced skills in observational astronomy (in particular stellar spectroscopy), data analysis, computational modeling, and interdisciplinary research, positioning you for a versatile career in academia or industry.

Relevant papers (feel free to ask for more):

https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2018MNRAS.478.4513B

https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2019ApJ...879...69T

https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2020A&A...638A.145T

https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2022MNRAS.513.5477H

https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2022ApJ...931...23G