Every year, OSU astronomy graduate students publish about 20 first author papers. The department awards the Ann S. Tuttle Paper Prize to one outstanding graduate student-led paper published during the preceding year, in this case 2024. This award was endowed by the estate of Ann Tuttle. Ms. Tuttle set up the fund to show her appreciation for the kindness shown her by Ann and Gerald Newsom, long time professor and former chair of the department. 

 

This year, we award the Ann S. Tuttle Graduate Paper Prize to Amanda Ash for her paper "Testing the Breakdown of the Asteroseismic Scaling Relations in Luminous Red Giants". Amanda did the lions share of the work on this paper, including stellar interiors models and combining them with pulsation models to predict oscillation frequencies. Evolved red giants are high amplitude oscillators, and their oscillation frequency patterns can be described with a characteristic mean oscillation frequency and characteristic frequency spacing mode, and these two properties can be used to infer masses and radii of evolved stars. However, there was a problem in that the radii derived this way didn't match fundamental radius data for luminous stars. Amanda led a careful study to address this problem and had several key results. First, she found that the frequency of maximum power scaling relation was accurate even in the luminous stars, but that the frequency spacing relation was responsible for the problem. Second, she showed it was defects in the theoretical models that were responsible for the breakdown in frequency spacing data, and she proposed a solution. Her paper has had a significant impact already with 17 citations to date, and it has led to some substantive changes in how we approach asteroseismology for stellar population studies. Congratulations, Amanda!