Astronomy researcher based in Colorado. I run a nonprofit adopt a star program to help fund astronomy research. #firstgen
Travis Metcalfe
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This paper was finally released from moderation purgatory last night, but @arxiv.bsky.social only allowed it to be posted to the general physics archive that almost nobody follows. arxiv.org/abs/2606.04927
I've been showing this plot in seminars for the past six months, and I finally decided to publish a research note about it (not yet on @arxiv.bsky.social, still stuck in moderation). Take a look: iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3...
The recording is available here: youtu.be/ehAWBUPGo_s
SNEAK PREVIEW: after the collapse of the global dynamo stalls main-sequence spin-down for billions of years, physical expansion on the subgiant branch finally allows stars to reach the transition to anti-solar DR (~1.1 Ro_crit), restoring the large-scale field and reviving magnetic braking!
👉 Tomorrow (May 6 at 2:00pm MDT) I'll give HAO a sneak preview of a talk that I'm presenting next week at Stanford "Stellar Evidence of a Collapsing Solar Dynamo" www2.hao.ucar.edu/stellar-evid...
It took 10 years to trace Weakened Magnetic Braking back to it's root cause (the collapse of the global stellar dynamo), but next week at #AAS247 you can hear me explain how we did it in less than 10 minutes! Thursday, January 8th at 10:10am in room 222C. submissions.mirasmart.com/AAS247/Itine...
"Nature is so rich you are unlikely to look carefully at anything without learning something new, particularly in unexplored territory... do something nobody thinks is interesting. Trust me: it will be." ~Ed Nather whitedwarf.org/education/ad...
I'll be visiting New Mexico later this week, giving an astronomy colloquium about what happens to stellar dynamos toward the end of main-sequence lifetimes. astro.nmsu.edu/events/collo...
Looking forward to giving the LASP seminar this afternoon, 1:00pm in SPSC-N100 and on zoom (preview of an astronomy colloquium next week at NMSU). lasp.colorado.edu?science-semi...
When I wrote this "Quick Study" on Weakened Magnetic Braking for @physicstoday.bsky.social in 2018, we already had the physical picture largely correct – we just didn't have all of the evidence in hand to support it. Now we do. physicstoday.aip.org/quick-study/...
In 2007, Erika Bohm-Vitense published a provocative figure suggesting that the solar rotation period and activity cycle made the Sun an outlier compared to the trends observed for stars in the Mount W...
Old Sun-like stars observed by the Kepler Space Telescope spin faster than astronomers expected. Apparently, they experience a dramatic shift in their rotation and magnetism at about middle age.
