UH Hilo astronomer Pierre Martin and international research team discover extremely rare property in star

By Susan Enright.

For two decades, an international collaboration of astronomers led by R. Pierre Martin from the University of Hawaiʻi at Hilo, and including his colleagues from Ukraine, has been studying a large number of Cepheids distributed across the Milky Way disk, obtaining high quality spectra and then using models to accurately determine their chemical composition. Pierre Martin pictured with telescope in background. Pierre Martin

During a recent survey conducted with the spectrograph ESPaDOnS at the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope on Maunakea, one of the stars observed in their program, named V470 Cas, showed a very unusual property: the spectral features revealed that lithium was very abundant in that star.

Martin’s research team includes Ukrainian astronomers Valery Kovtyukh and S. M. Andrievskii from Mechnikov National University, Odessa, and Sergey Korotin from the Crimean Astrophysical Observatory located at Nauchnij research campus.

A report on their work, titled, “Lithium-rich Cepheid V470 Cas,” was recently published in the peer-reviewed journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.

Read the full article at UH Hilo Stories