Related papers: Post-Red Supergiants

Our knowledge of the chemical properties of the circumstellar ejecta of the most massive evolved stars is particularly poor. We aim to study the chemical characteristics of the prototypical yellow hypergiant star, IRC +10420. For this…

Massive stars are rare but of paramount importance for their immediate environment and their host galaxies. They lose mass from their birth through strong stellar winds up to their spectacular end of their lives as supernovae. The mass loss…

The red supergiant (RSG) problem, which describes the apparent lack of high-luminosity progenitors detected in Type II supernova (SN) pre-images, has been a contentious topic for two decades. We re-assess this problem using a new RSG…

Every Sun-like star will eventually evolve into a red giant, a transition which can profoundly affect the evolution of a surrounding planetary system. The timescale of dynamical planet evolution and orbital decay has important implications…

We summarize the results of long-term spectral monitoring of yellow hypergiants (YHGs) of northern hemisphere with a R$\ge$60000 resolution. The spectra of these F-G stars of extremely high luminosity, compactly located at the top of the…

With a dynamical mass M_dyn ~ 1.3x10e5 M_sun and a lower limit M_cl>5x10e4 M_sun from star counts, Westerlund 1 is the most massive young open cluster known in the Galaxy and thus the perfect laboratory to study massive star evolution. We…

Spectro-seismic measurements of red giants enabled the recent discovery of stars in the thick disk that are more massive than 1.4 M_sun. While it has been claimed that most of these stars are younger than the rest of the typical thick disk…

Red supergiant stars represent a late stage of the evolution of stars more massive than about nine solar masses, in which they develop complex, multi-component atmospheres. Bright spots have been detected in the atmosphere of red…

Wolf-Rayet stars (WRs) represent the end of a massive star's life as it is about to turn into a supernova. Obtaining complete samples of such stars across a large range of metallicities poses observational challenges, but presents us with…

Recent stellar evolution computations indicate that massive stars in the range ~ 20 - 30 Msun are located in the blue supergiant (BSG) region of the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram at two different stages of their life: immediately after the…

Core-collapse supernova remnants are the nebular leftover of defunct massive stars which have died during a supernova explosion, mostly while undergoing the red supergiant phase of their evolution. The morphology and emission properties of…

It is thought that the first generations of massive stars in the Universe were an important, and quite possibly dominant, source of the ultra-violet radiation that reionized the hydrogen gas in the intergalactic medium (IGM); a state in…

Observational manifestations of far evolved stars at the asymptotic giants branch and their nearest descendants are briefly considered. Main results of their chemical composition determinations based on long term high resolution…

We discuss recent models on the evolution of massive stars at very low metallicity including the effects of rotation, magnetic fields and binarity. Very metal poor stars lose very little mass and angular momentum during the main sequence…

The post-main sequence evolution of stars of intermediate or large masses is notoriously complex. In the recent past, a number of workshops and meetings have focused on either the Asymptotic Giant Branch of intermediate mass stars, or the…

We investigate the red supergiant (RSG) population of M31, obtaining radial velocities of 255 stars. These data substantiate membership of our photometrically-selected sample, demonstrating that Galactic foreground stars and extragalactic…

Most massive stars end their lives as Red Supergiants (RSGs), a short-lived evolution phase when they are known to pulsate with varying amplitudes. The RSG period-luminosity (PL) relation has been measured in the Milky Way, the Magellanic…

B[e] supergiants (B[e]SGs) are transitional objects in the post-main sequence evolution of massive stars. The small number of B[e]SGs known so far in the Galaxy and the Magellanic Clouds indicates that this evolutionary phase is short.…

We observed the Blue Compact Dwarf/Wolf-Rayet galaxy Mrk 178 with the NICMOS camera aboard HST. The galaxy is well resolved into individual stars in the near-IR; photometry in J and H yields color-magnitude diagrams containing 791…

We report the serendipitous discovery of an object, UVQS J060819.93-715737.4, with a spectrum dominated by extremely intense, narrow C II emission lines. The spectrum is similar to those of the very rare, late-type [WC11] low-mass…