Professor Christopher Tout
Year started
2000
Subject
Mathematics
Fellow Type
Lecturers, Professors and College Officers,
In about 5000 million years time the Sun will exhaust its supply of hydrogen nuclear fuel, which has been powering it until now, and will evolve into a red giant and eventually a white dwarf. Christopher Tout models the evolution of stars, both similar to the Sun and very different, stars that manufacture the elements, stars that explode in supernovae, and stars that interact with other stars. Most stars have a companion and, when close enough, the tides these two massive bodies raise on one another cause material to overflow with spectacular consequences, particularly when one of the two is a compact neutron star or black hole. His contributions range from understanding the physics of these interactions to predicting the diversity of exotic objects formed when the millions of stars in densely populated globular clusters encounter one another.