Selma de Mink

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My main reserach interest is the evolution of massive stars: the stars that shape the Universe. With their high luminosities, strong stellar winds, and violent deaths they can be considered as "cosmic engines", polluting and ionizing their suroundings, setting the conditions in which new generations of stars and their planets form. They transformed the prisitine Universe, left after the Big Bang, to the modern Universe, in which we live today. The majority of massive stars have a nearby companion star, with which they can interact or even merge. With my work, I try to understand how such interactions affect the role massive stars play as engines of the cosmos.

The two main themes in my thesis are rotation and interaction with a companion star. Using different stellar codes we approach some topical questions in the field with a fresh view, ranging from a new formation scenario for massive X-ray binaries (A&A 09) to the intriguing chemical patterns found for stars in globular clusters, where we propose that binary interaction plays a major role in the enrichment of their suroundings (A&A Letters 09). Other papers in my thesis discuss how eclipsing binaries can be used as critical tests for our models (A&A 2007), how stellar rotation can mimic the presence of an age-spread in certain star cluster (MNRAS Letters 09) the puzzling origin of fluorine in the most metal-poor stars in our galaxy (A&A Letters 08) and the potential formation of intermediate-mass black holes via a series stellar collisions (A&A 09)

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