Macroscopic element transport in massive stars.

Massive stars are the dominant suppliers of heavy elements, and hence play an important role in our universe, life as we know it on Earth wouldn’t have existed without them. Through stellar winds during their lifetime and their final end as supernovae explosions, they are responsible for the chemical enrichment of the interstellar medium. During approximately 90% of their evolution, macroscopic element transport in and near the cores of these massive stars have a large influence on their life. However, these processes provide the largest uncertainties in stellar structure and evolution models for massive stars, due to our poor understanding of macroscopic element transport and limited number of useful observations to test the theories. With this PhD project, we intend to combine results from 3D hydrodynamical simulations, 1D stellar evolution codes, and knowledge of stellar pulsations to unravel the macroscopic element transport in massive stars.