Related papers: New Atomic Data for Trans-Iron Elements and Their …

The heaviest chemical elements are naturally produced by the rapid neutron-capture process (r-process) during neutron star mergers or supernovae. The r-process production of elements heavier than uranium (transuranic nuclei) is poorly…

Planetary nebulae (PNe) provide tests of stellar evolution, can serve as tracers of chemical evolution in the Milky Way and other galaxies, and are also used as a calibrator of the cosmological distance ladder. Current and upcoming large…

Spectroscopic observations obtained with the VLT of one planetary nebula (PN) in Sextans A and of five PNe in Sextans B and of several HII regions (HII) in these two dwarf irregular galaxies are presented. The extended spectral coverage,…

Abundance observations indicate the presence of often surprisingly large amounts of neutron capture (i.e., s- and r-process) elements in old Galactic halo and globular cluster stars. These observations provide insight into the nature of the…

The TRACER instrument (``Transition Radiation Array for Cosmic Energetic Radiation'') has been developed for direct measurements of the heavier primary cosmic-ray nuclei at high energies. The instrument had a successful long-duration…

Planetary nebulae retain the signature of the nucleosynthesis and mixing events that occurred during the previous AGB phase. Observational signatures complement observations of AGB and post-AGB stars and their binary companions. The…

We present deep high-resolution (R~15,000) and high-quality UVES optical spectrophotometry of nine planetary nebulae with dual-dust chemistry. We compute physical conditions from several diagnostics. Ionic abundances for a large number of…

The elements germanium (Ge, Z=32), arsenic (As, Z=33), and selenium (Se, Z=34) span the transition from charged-particle or explosive synthesis of the iron-group elements to neutron-capture synthesis of heavier elements. Among these three…

Abundance ratios of radioactive to stable neutron-capture elements in very metal-poor stars may be used to estimate the age of our Galaxy. But extracting accurate ages from these data requires continuing work on many fronts: a)…

We present a spectroscopic investigation of 25 objects previously reported as possible Planetary Nebulae (PNe) in recent catalogs to obtain their physical properties and to establish their true nature. We found 11 objects showing intense…

We present new abundance observations of neutron-capture elements in Galactic stars. These include new Hubble Space Telescope (HST) detections of the elements Ge, Zr and Pt in a group of 11 halo stars. Correlations between these elements…

We constrain the iron abundance in a sample of 33 low-ionization Galactic planetary nebulae (PNe) using [Fe III] lines and correcting for the contribution of higher ionization states with ionization correction factors (ICFs) that take into…

New elemental abundances for the neutron-capture elements Sr, Nb, Mo, Ru, La, Sm, and Eu are presented for a large sample of 180 barium (Ba) giant stars, a class of chemically peculiar objects that exhibit in their spectra enhancements of…

Type I planetary nebulae (PNe) have high He/H and N/O ratios and are thought to be descendants of stars with initial masses of ~3-8Msun. These characteristics indicate that the progenitor stars experienced proton-capture nucleosynthesis at…

To better characterize the abundance patterns produced by the r-process, we have derived new abundances or upper limits for the heavy elements zinc (Zn), yttrium (Y), lanthanum (La), europium (Eu), and lead (Pb). Our sample of 161…

Relativistic atomic structure calculations for electric dipole E1, electric quadrupole E2 and magnetic dipole M1 transition probabilities among the first 80 fine-structure levels of Fe VI, dominated by configurations 3d^3, 3d^24s, and…

We present high signal-to-noise spectrophotometric observations of seven luminous HII galaxies. The observations have been made with the use of a double-arm spectrograph which provides spectra with a wide wavelength coverage, from 3400 to…

This work describes a study of elemental abundances for 30 metal-poor stars whose chemical abundances provide excellent information for setting constraints on models of neutron-capture processes. Based on the abundances of main r- and weak…

We report the abundances of neutron-capture elements in eight carbon-rich, metal-poor (-2.7=<[Fe/H]=<-1.9) stars observed with the Subaru Telescope High Dispersion Spectrograph. The derived abundance patterns indicate that the…

In this paper we present an analysis of the physical and chemical conditions of the planetary nebula NGC 40 through spatially-resolved spectroscopic maps. We also introduce a new algorithm --2D_NEB-- based on the well-established IRAF…