Related papers: The evolutionary status of the blue hook stars in …
omega Cen contains the largest population of very hot horizontal branch (HB) stars known in a globular cluster. Recent UV observations (Whitney et al. 1998; D'Cruz et al. 2000) show a significant population of hot stars below the zero-age…
Hot subluminous stars lying up to 0.7 mag below the extreme horizontal branch (EHB) are found in the UV color-magnitude diagrams of omega Cen and NGC 2808. Such stars are unexplained by canonical HB theory. In order to explore the origin of…
UV observations of some massive globular clusters uncovered a significant population of very hot stars below the hot end of the horizontal branch (HB), the so-called blue hook stars. This feature might be explained either as results of the…
Blue hook stars are a class of subluminous extreme horizontal branch stars that were discovered in UV images of the massive globular clusters omega Cen and NGC 2808. These stars occupy a region of the HR diagram that is unexplained by…
UV observations of some massive globular clusters have revealed a significant population of stars hotter and fainter than the hot end of the horizontal branch (HB), the so-called blue hook stars. This feature might be explained either by…
Stars with very large mass loss on the red-giant branch can undergo the helium flash while descending the white-dwarf cooling curve. Under these conditions the flash convection zone will mix the hydrogen envelope with the hot helium-…
Recent UV observations of the most massive Galactic globular clusters show a significant population of hot stars below the zero-age HB (``blue hook'' stars), which cannot be explained by canonical stellar evolution. Stars which suffer…
The presence of extreme horizontal branch (EHB) and blue hook stars in some Galactic globular clusters (GGCs) constitutes one of the remaining mysteries of stellar evolution. In this paper, we focus on $\omega$ Cen, a peculiar, massive GGC…
The observed abundance variations in globular cluster red giants indicate that these stars may be mixing helium from the hydrogen shell outward into the envelope, presumably as a result of internal rotation. We have investigated the…
The globular cluster omega Centauri contains the largest known population of very hot horizontal branch (HB) stars. We have used the Hubble Space Telescope to obtain a far-UV/optical color-magnitude diagram of three fields in omega Cen. We…
Horizontal Branch stars belong to an advanced stage in the evolution of the oldest stellar galactic population, occurring either as field halo stars or grouped in globular clusters. The discovery of multiple populations in these clusters,…
We analyze the reddening, surface helium abundance and mass of 115 horizontal branch (HB) and blue hook (BH) stars in OmegaCentauri, spanning the HB from the blue edge of the instability strip to Teff~50000K. The mean cluster reddening is…
We construct a speculative scenario for rotation-induced extra helium mixing to the envelope of horizontal branch (HB) stars. This scenario differs from previous ones in that the mixing occurs after the star has left the red giant branch…
Strong mass loss on the red giant branch (RGB) can result in the formation of extreme horizontal branch (EHB) stars. The EHB stars spend most of their He core and shell burning phase at high temperatures and produce copious ultraviolet…
I review aspects of the evolution of horizontal branch (HB) stars. I start by discussing current topics in the study of HB stellar evolution, including a brief review of the main determinants of the structure of low-mass core helium burning…
We investigate a peculiar feature at the hottest, blue end of the horizontal branch of Galactic globular cluster omega Centauri, using the high-precision and nearly complete catalog that has been constructed from a survey taken with the ACS…
To study the possible origin of the huge helium enrichment attributed to the stars on the blue main sequence of Omega Centauri, we make use of a chemical evolution model that has proven able to reproduce other major observed properties of…
Recent UV observations of the globular cluster NGC2808 (Brown et al. 2001) show a significant population of hot stars fainter than the zero-age horizontal branch (``blue hook'' stars), which cannot be explained by canonical stellar…
The core helium-flash in low-mass stars with extreme mass loss occurs after the tip of the RGB, when the H-rich envelope is very thin. The low efficiency of the H-shell source enables the He-flash driven convective zone to penetrate H-rich…
Recent observations for the color-magnitude diagrams (CMDs) of the massive globular cluster Omega Centauri have shown that it has a striking double main sequence (MS), with a minority population of bluer and fainter MS well separated from a…