I defended my PhD thesis in astrophysics in July of 2024. During my thesis, I worked under the supervision of Patrick Eggenberger and Georges Meynet. The topic of my thesis was the study of angular momentum transport in stellar interiors from a theoretical point of view. My PhD thesis can be found here: "Angular Momentum Transport in Stellar Interiors"

I work on stellar evolution of rotating stars with a theoretical approach by computing and analysing models with 1d stellar evolution codes such as MESA or the Geneva stellar evolution code. My main focus is the study of the angular momentum transport in stellar interiors, which means that I study the effect of different physical processes on the rotational velocities through stellar evolution. Some of these processes include shear instabilities, meridional circulation, magnetic fields, internal gravity waves, among others.

 My goal is to identify which physical process can reproduce the observational data. For this I compare the results from models with constraints from asteroseismology and spectroscopy, which can give us information both at the interior and the surface of the star. An example of my work is shown in the figure below, part of one of my papers on the angular momentum transport in main sequence stars (Moyano et al. 2023b), where I showed how internal magnetic fields can reproduce both the core rotation rate probed by gravity modes (x-axis) and the surface rotational velocities measured from spectroscopy (y-axis), whereas models without internal magnetic fields fail to reproduce them.

 This kind of comparisons allow us to probe the physics of stellar interiors and improve the modelling of rotation in stellar interiors, which in turn can improve the modelling of chemical mixing in stellar interiors, and potentially identify the dominating mechanisms by which chemical elements are transported to the stellar surface.

Publications: ADS Library

Contact: facundo.moyano(at)unige.ch