Hypatia Catalog

While stars are composed mostly of hydrogen and helium, it’s within them that most of the elements of the Periodic Table are created. We can observe the composition of each star from Earth by studying the light that it produces, a technique called spectroscopy. The amount of a particular element within the star, which are called stellar abundances, are of high value to astronomers answering a wide variety of questions. The aim of the Hypatia Catalog is to bring together information about these stellar abundances for over 5,000 stars in one dataset. It was created and is currently maintained by Dr. Natalie Hinkel, a post-doctorate researcher at Vanderbilt.

I am working on an online visualization tool with help from Vanderbilt undergraduates Ben Knight and Wendy Yu that allows astronomers to sort through the Hypatia Catalog and analyze data through interactive charts and tables.

The Hypatia Catalog Database is available at hypatiacatalog.com.

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Logo for Hypatia Catalog was designed by Nahks Tr’Ehnl.