| dc.description.abstract | Defining the age of a star has been an ongoing challenge within astronomy and astrophysics but holds a great importance within these fields because it allows us to understand stellar evolution and cluster evolution and to understand the history and evolution of the galaxies, including our own Milky Way galaxy. Isochrones, also known as stellar evolutionary tracks, are models of the H-R Diagram which represent a variety of stars at different masses with the same age, and are a common method used to determine the ages of star clusters. This research shows work that determines new and improved values for age and distance of star clusters using new measurements for the chemical composition of star cluster stars. It also employs a new technique that uses interstellar dust as a tool to isolate member stars in the star clusters from random stars in the Galaxy. Using this uniform dataset, an isochrone fitting method is applied to those members in order to determine new values for the fundamental parameters (age and distance) for obscured star clusters with chemistry measured using the APOGEE survey. | |
