Related papers: Maser Studies in Evolved Stars
We briefly review the main problems related to the computation of the evolution of intermediate-mass stars: the treatment of turbulent convection and the occurrence of blue loops during the core He-burning phase. It is shown that, in order…
Massive stars are essential to understand a variety of branches of astronomy including galaxy and star cluster evolution, nucleosynthesis and supernovae, pulsars and black holes. It has become evident that massive star evolution is very…
Stellar population synthesis (SPS) models are used to infer many galactic properties including star formation histories, metallicities, and stellar and dust masses. However, most SPS models neglect the effect of circumstellar dust shells…
Post-AGB stars are key objects for the study of the dramatic morphological changes of low- to intermediate-mass stars on their evolution from the Asymptotic Giant Branch (AGB) towards the Planetary Nebula stage. There is growing evidences…
Context. The asymptotic giant branch (AGB) phase marks the end of the evolution for low- and intermediate-mass stars, which are fundamental contributors to the mass return to the interstellar medium and to the chemical evolution of…
Massive stars have a profound influence on the Universe, but their formation remains poorly understood. We review the current status of observational and theoretical research in this field, describing the various stages of an evolutionary…
The nearby dwarf irregular galaxies the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds have metallicities of about half and a fifth solar, respectively, which offers the unique opportunity to study astrophysical processes as a function of metallicity.…
Radio campaigns using maser stellar beacons have provided crucial information to characterize Galactic stellar populations. Currently, the Bulge Asymmetries and Dynamical Evolution (BAaDE) project is surveying infrared (IR) color-selected…
A hot plasma is the dominant phase of the interstellar medium of early-type galaxies. Its origin can reside in stellar mass losses, residual gas from the formation epoch, and accretion from outside of the galaxies. Its evolution is linked…
The intense line emission of OH masers is a perfect tracer of regions where new stars are born aswell as of evolved stars, shedding large amounts of processed matter into the interstellar medium. From SKA deep surveys at 18 cm, where the…
The radiative transfer problem is considered in dense gas-dust clouds. Physical parameters are adopted in simulations corresponding to gas-dust clouds in the circumstellar envelopes of late-type stars. An one-dimensional plane-parallel slab…
Atmospheres of evolved AGB stars are heavily affected by pulsation, dust formation and mass loss, and they can become very extended. Time series of observed high-resolution spectra proved to be a useful tool to study atmospheric dynamics…
It is generally acknowledged that the mass loss of Asymptotic Giant Branch (AGB) stars undergoes variations on different time scales. We constructed models for the dust envelopes for a sample of AGB stars to assess whether mass-loss…
Our mid-infrared and near-infrared surveys over the last five years have helped to strengthen and clarify the relationships between water, methanol, and OH masers and the star formation process. Our surveys show that maser emission seems to…
The space-borne missions CoRoT and Kepler have opened a new era in stellar physics, especially for evolved stars, with precise asteroseismic measurements that help determine precise stellar parameters and perform ensemble astero seismology.…
We present maps at $20''$ resolution of the molecular emission around 18 evolved stars (14~asymptotic giant branch stars, one supergiant, two proto-planetary nebulae and one planetary nebula), mostly in the $^{12}$CO(3-2) line. Almost all…
Thanks to their usefulness in various fields of astrophysics (e.g. mixing processes in stars, chemical evolution of galaxies), the last few years have witnessed a large increase in the amount of abundance data for early-type stars. Two…
The slow, dense winds observed in evolved asymptotic giant branch (AGB) stars are usually attributed to a combination of dust formation in the dynamical inner atmosphere and momentum transfer from stellar photons interacting with the newly…
Mass loss and variability are two linked, fundamental properties of evolved stars. In this paper I review our current understanding of these processes, with a particular focus on how observations and models are used to constrain reliable…
Massive stars are important metal factories in the Universe. They have short and energetic lives, and many of them inevitably explode as a supernova and become a neutron star or black hole. In turn, the formation, evolution and explosive…