Related papers: Radioactivities in Low- and Intermediate-Mass Star…
(abridged) We model the nucleosynthesis during the thermal pulse phase of a rotating, solar metallicity AGB star of 3M_sun. Rotationally induced mixing during the thermal pulses produces a layer (~2E-5M_sun) on top of the CO-core where…
Recent observations of heavy elements in Globular Clusters reveal intriguing deviations from the standard paradigm of the early galactic nucleosynthesis. If the r-process contamination is a common feature of halo stars, s-process…
Young, fast-rotating neutron stars are promising candidate sources for the production of ultrahigh energy cosmic rays (UHECRs). The interest in this model has recently been boosted by the latest chemical composition measurements of cosmic…
The main component of the s process is produced by low mass stars (between 1.5 and 3 Mo), when they climb for the second time the red giant branch and experience a series of He shell flashes called thermal pulses. During the relatively long…
Long gamma-ray bursts (GRBs), among the most energetic events in the Universe, are explosions of massive and short-lived stars, so they pinpoint locations of recent star formation. However, several GRB host galaxies have recently been found…
Preliminary results of a new set of stellar evolution and nucleosynthesis calculations for massive stars are presented. These results were obtained with an extended reaction network up to Bi. The discussion focuses on the importance of…
Al(26) radioactivity traces recent nucleosynthesis throughout the Galaxy, and is known to be produced in massive stars and novae. The map from its decay gamma-ray line suggests massive stars to dominate, but high-resolution line…
The merger of two neutron stars or of a neutron star and a black hole often result in the ejection of a few percents of a solar mass of matter expanding at high speed in space. Being matter coming from the violent disruption of a neutron…
Metal-poor stars were formed during the early epochs when only massive stars had time to evolve and contribute to the chemical enrichment. Low-mass metal-poor stars survive until the present and provide fossil records of the nucleosynthesis…
The elemental abundances of ten planetary nebulae, derived with high accuracy including ISO and IUE spectra, are analysed with the aid of synthetic evolutionary models for the TP-AGB phase. Model prescriptions are varied until we achieve…
We extract from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey a sample of 347 systems involving early type galaxies separated by less than 30 kpc, in projection, and 500 km/s in radial velocity. These close pairs are likely progenitors of dry mergers. The…
Thermally pulsating asymptotic giant branch (AGB) stars are the main producers of slow neutron capture (s-) process elements, but there are still large uncertainties associated with the formation of the main neutron source, 13C, and with…
Stars are powerful sources for weakly interacting particles that are produced by nuclear or plasma processes in their hot interior. These fluxes can be used for direct measurements (e.g. solar or supernova neutrinos) or the back-reaction on…
We investigate both the systematic and statistical uncertainties associated with theoretical nuclear reaction rates of relevance during the i-process and explore their impact on the i-process elemental production, and subsequently on the…
Indirect methods using nucleus-nucleus reactions at high energies (here, high energies mean $\sim$ 50 MeV/nucleon and higher) are now routinely used to extract information of interest for nuclear astrophysics. This is of extreme relevance…
High spatial resolution, near-infrared imaging and spectroscopy of the nuclear star cluster have given key new insights about the dynamics, evolution and mass distribution in the Milky Way Center. The central parsec is powered by a cluster…
To reach a deeper understanding of the origin of elements in the periodic table, we construct Galactic chemical evolution (GCE) models for all stable elements from C (A=12) to U (A=238) from first principles, i.e., using theoretical…
Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN) are highly energetic astrophysical sources powered by accretion onto supermassive black holes in galaxies, which present unique observational signatures covering the full electromagnetic spectrum (and more) over…
Infrared observations of complete samples of active galactic nuclei (AGN) have shown that a substantial fraction of their bolometric luminosity is emitted at wavelengths ~8-1000microns. In radio-loud and Blazar-like objects much of this…
We present spatially resolved imaging and integral field spectroscopy data for 450 cool giant stars within 1\,pc from Sgr\,A*. We use the prominent CO bandheads to derive effective temperatures of individual giants. Additionally we present…