Related papers: Evolution and nucleosynthesis in low mass Asymptot…
Observing the stars in our night sky tells us that giant, supergiant and hypergiant stars hold an unique importance in the understanding of stellar populations. Theoretical stellar models predict a rich tapestry of evolved stars. These…
We know that giant planets played a crucial role in the making of our Solar System. The discovery of giant planets orbiting other stars is a formidable opportunity to learn more about these objects, what is their composition, how various…
We study a sample of post-AGB stars in the Galaxy, with known surface chemical composition and s-process enrichment. The recent determination of the luminosities of these sources, based on Gaia parallaxes, allows for the fist time a deep…
The age and chemical composition of the stars in present-day galaxies carry important clues about their star formation processes. The latest generation of population synthesis models have allowed to derive age and stellar metallicity…
The majority of the inhomogeneities in the chemical composition of Globular Cluster (GC) stars appear due to primordial enrichment. The most studied model today claims that the ejecta of Asymptotic Giant Branch (AGB) stars of high mass…
The compositions of stars are a critical diagnostic tool for many topics in astronomy such as the evolution of our Galaxy, the formation of planets, and the uniqueness of the Sun. Previous spectroscopic measurements indicate a large…
The census of heavy elements (metals) produced by all stars through cosmic times up to present-day is limited to ~50%; of these only half are still found within their parent galaxy. The majority of metals is expelled from galaxies into the…
There is now strong evidence that some stars have been born with He mass fractions as high as $Y \approx 0.40$ (e.g., in $\omega$ Centauri). However, the advanced evolution, chemical yields, and final fates of He-rich stars are largely…
The abundances of the {\it rare} light elements, Li, Be, and B, provide clues about stellar structure and evolution, about Galactic evolution and about their nucleosynthesis, including production during the Big Bang. The abundances of the…
Massive stars are able to pursue their evolution through the whole sequence of burning phases. They are born hot and luminous, and live a short life before exploding as a supernova or collapsing directly into a black hole. They have a…
Barium stars are extrinsic Asymptotic Giant Branch (AGB) stars. They present the s-enhancement characteristic for AGB and post-AGB stars, but are in an earlier evolutionary stage (main sequence dwarfs, subgiants, red giants). They are…
Nuclear physics has a long and productive history of application to astrophysics which continues today. Advances in the accuracy and breadth of astrophysical data and theory drive the need for better experimental and theoretical…
A Big Bang universe consisting, before recombination, of H, D, 3He, 4He, 6Li, and 7Li ions, electrons, photons, and massless neutrinos, at closure density, with a galaxy-size perturbation spectrum but no large-scale structure, will evolve…
The S-type stars are believed to have a C/O-ratio close to unity (within a few percent). They are considered to represent an intermediate evolutionary stage as AGB stars evolve from oxygen-rich M-type stars into carbon stars. As possible…
Using 17 chemical elements as a proxy for stellar DNA, we present a full phylogenetic study of stars in the solar neighbourhood. This entails applying a clustering technique that is widely used in molecular biology to construct an…
Protostars and young stars are strongly spatially "clustered" or "correlated" within their natal giant molecular clouds (GMCs). We demonstrate that such clustering leads to the conclusion that the incident bolometric radiative flux upon a…
In the present universe, the gas is a minor component of giant galaxies, and its dominant phase is atomic (HI). During galaxy evolution in cosmic times, models predict that gas fractions were much higher in galaxies, and gas phases could be…
Stars and planets are the fundamental objects of the Universe. Their formation processes, though related, may differ in important ways. Stars almost certainly form from gravitational collapse and probably have formed this way since the…
The physical processes driving chemical evolution in the Milky Way can be probed using the distribution of abundances in low-mass FGK type stars in space phase at different times. During their final stages of evolution stars experience…
The chemical evolution of the Galaxy is followed for the elements affected by neutron capture, in particular for those in the atomic number range 56 to 63 (Ba, La, Ce, Pr, Nd, Sm and Eu). Neutrons by the major 13^C source, released in…