Related papers: Why do low-mass stars become red giants?
Robust age estimates of red giant stars are now possible thanks to the precise inference of their mass based on asteroseismic constraints. However, there are cases where such age estimates can be highly precise yet very inaccurate. An…
The evolution of massive stars is affected by a variety of physical processes including convection, rotation, mass loss and binary interaction. Because these processes modify the internal chemical abundance profiles in multiple ways…
The first stars in the Universe are predicted to have been much more massive than the Sun. Gravitational condensation accompanied by cooling of the primordial gas due to molecular hydrogen, yields a minimum fragmentation scale of a few…
Young stars on their way to the ZAMS evolve in significantly different ways depending on mass. While the theoretical and observational properties of low- and intermediate-mass stars are rather well understood and/or empirically tested, the…
While the modern stellar IMF shows a rapid decline with increasing mass, theoretical investigations suggest that very massive stars (>100 solar masses) may have been abundant in the early universe. Other calculations also indicate that,…
We investigate the contribution of star formation to the growth of stellar mass in galaxies over the redshift range 0.5 < z < 1.1 by studying the redshift evolution of the specific star formation rate (SSFR), defined as the star formation…
A small fraction of red giants are known to be lithium (Li) rich, in contradiction with expectations from stellar evolutionary theory. A possible explanation for these atypical giants is the engulfment of a Li-rich planet or brown dwarf by…
From the time the first stars formed over 13 billion years ago to the present, star formation has had an unexpectedly dynamic history. At first, the star formation rate density increased dramatically, reaching a peak 10 billion years ago…
Over the past decade increasingly robust estimates of the dense molecular gas content in galaxy populations between redshift 0 and the peak of cosmic galaxy/star formation from redshift 1-3 have become available. This rapid progress has…
With red supergiants (RSGs) predicted to end their lives as Type IIP core collapse supernova (CCSN), their behaviour before explosion needs to be fully understood. Mass loss rates govern RSG evolution towards SN and have strong implications…
The surface [C/N] of red giants is correlated with birth mass, but not directly impacted by mass loss. Exploiting this, we compare asteroseismic masses of red giants with the same [C/N] and but different evolutionary states. We find bulk…
The formation of massive stars is one of the major unsolved problems in stellar astrophysics. However, only few if any of these are found as single stars, on average massive stars have more than one companion. Many of them are born in dense…
Massive stars becoming red supergiants lose a significant amount of their mass during that brief evolutionary phase. They then either explode as a hydrogen-rich supernova (SN Type II), or continue to evolve as a hotter supergiant (before…
Massive galaxies, such as nearby ellipticals, have relatively low number densities, yet they host the majority of the stellar mass in the universe. Understanding their origin is a central problem of galaxy formation. Age dating of stellar…
We investigate the physical processes which lead to the formation of massive stars. Using a numerical simulation of the formation of a stellar cluster from a turbulent molecular cloud, we evaluate the relevant contributions of fragmentation…
The physical structures of the outer atmospheres of red giants are not known. They are certainly complex and a range of recent observations are showing that we need to embrace to non-classical atmosphere models to interpret these regions.…
Determination of the star formation rate can be done using mid-IR photometry or Balmer line luminosity after a proper correction for extinction effects. Both methods show convergent results while those based on UV or on [OII]3727…
The observation that old, massive galaxies have a larger fraction of low-mass stars than their younger, lower-mass counterparts adds to mounting evidence that star formation may have been different in the early Universe.
How stellar mass assembles within galaxies is still an open question. We present measurements of the stellar mass distribution on kpc-scale for $\sim5500$ galaxies with stellar masses above $\log(M_{\ast}/M_{\odot})\geqslant9.8$ up to the…
We present an analysis of galaxies in the CDF-South. We find a tight relation to z=3 between color and size at a given mass, with red galaxies being small, and blue galaxies being large. We show that the relation is driven by stellar…