Related papers: On a new parameter to estimate the helium content …
The understanding of mixing processes in stars is crucial for improving our knowledge of the chemical abundances in stellar photospheres and of their variation with evolutionary phase. This is fundamental for many astrophysical issues on…
Standard big bang nucleosynthesis (BBNS) promises accurate predictions of the primordial abundances of deuterium, helium-3, helium-4 and lithium-7 as a function of a single parameter. Previous measurements have nearly always been…
Core helium burning primary red clump (RC) stars are evolved red giant stars which are excellent standard candles. As such, these stars are routinely used to map the Milky Way or determine the distance to other galaxies among other things.…
We present wide field near-infrared photometry of 12 Galactic globular clusters, typically extending from the tip of the cluster red giant branch (RGB) to the main sequence turnoff. Using recent homogenous values of cluster distance,…
The treatment of convective boundaries during core helium burning is a fundamental problem in stellar evolution calculations. In Paper~I we showed that new asteroseismic observations of these stars imply they have either very large…
We measure the red giant branch bump (RGBB) of the Galactic bulge, the most metal-rich RGBB ever detected. The RGBB luminosity functions peaks at the expected brightness, but its number density is very low relative to Galactic globular…
We present the first robust helium (He) abundance measurements in star-forming galaxies at redshifts $1.6\lesssim z\lesssim 3.3$ using deep, moderate-resolution JWST/NIRSpec spectroscopy from the AURORA survey. We establish a High$-z$ HeI…
High-resolution optical spectra of sixteen red giants, two early asymptotic giant branch (AGB) stars, and two supergiants, having no/minimal to super lithium (Li)-rich abundances, are analyzed to investigate the helium (He)-enhancement. The…
We present new data and discuss the relationship between the Al abundances on the red giant branches (RGBs) and the horizontal-branch (HB) morphologies of the second-parameter pair of globular clusters M3 and M13. Since Al is produced…
Asteroseismology can provide joint constraints on masses and radii of individual stars. While this approach has been extensively tested for red giant branch (RGB) stars, it has been more difficult to test for helium core-burning red-clump…
The most massive Galactic globular cluster, Omega centauri, appears to have multiple populations. Its bluest main sequence and extended horizontal branch stars are suggested to have the common origin, that is, an extremely high helium…
We have tested the reliability of the red giant branch (RGB) as a metallicity indicator accounting for observational errors as well as the complexity of star formation histories (SFHs) and chemical evolution histories observed in various…
We carry out and analyze new multi-color photometry of the Galactic globular cluster (GC) M75 in UBVI and focus on the brighter sequences of the color- magnitude diagram (CMD), with particular emphasis on their location in U-based CMD.…
We present an empirical method to derive photometric metallicity, reddening and distance to old stellar populations by using a few major features of the Red Giant Branch (RGB) in near IR color magnitude diagrams. We combine the observed RGB…
Recent precise determinations of the primordial He-abundance (Y_p) from cosmic microwave background (CMB) analyses and cosmological nucleosynthesis computations, provide Y_p=0.248$\pm$0.001. On the other hand, recent works on the initial…
Current stellar model predictions of adiabatic oscillation frequencies differ significantly from the corresponding observed frequencies due to the non-adiabatic and poorly understood near-surface layers of stars. However, certain…
We have calculated synthetic spectra for typical chemical element mixtures (i.e., a standard alpha-enhanced distribution, and distributions displaying CN and ONa anticorrelations) found in the various subpopulations harboured by Galactic…
Globular Cluster (GC) Color-Magnitude Diagrams (CMDs) are reasonably well understood in terms of standard stellar-evolution. However, there are still some open issues, such as fully accounting for the Horizontal Branch (HB) morphology in…
New theoretical evaluations of the RGB luminosity function 'bump' and the ZAHB luminosity covering the range of metallicities typical of galactic globular cluster are presented. The variation of the theoretical RGB bump and ZAHB levels due…
Although not predicted by standard stellar evolution, the surface abundance of light elements, such as lithium (Li), carbon, and nitrogen, changes during the red giant branch (RGB) as a result of extra-mixing. This is associated usually…