Related papers: Dusty Blue Supergiants: News from High-Angular Res…
In this review I first describe the nature of the three kinds of High-Mass X-ray Binaries (HMXBs), accreting through: (i) Be circumstellar disc, (ii) supergiant stellar wind, and (iii) Roche lobe filling supergiants. I then report on the…
Optical interferometry is a powerful tool to investigate the close environment of AGB stars. With a spatial resolution of a few milli-arcseconds, it is even possible to image directly the surface of angularly large objects. This is of…
Many massive stars travel through the interstellar medium at supersonic speeds. As a result they form bow shocks at the interface between the stellar wind. We use numerical hydrodynamics to reproduce such bow shocks numerically, creating…
Massive evolved stars in transition phases, such as Luminous Blue Variables (LBVs), B[e] Supergiants (B[e]SGs), and Yellow Hypergiants (YHGs), are not well understood, and yet crucial steps in determining accurate stellar and galactic…
The recent high angular resolution observations have shown that the transition between a globally symmetrical giant and a source surrounded by a spatially complex environment occurs relatively early, as soon as the external layers of the…
Galaxy counts from bright ultraviolet (UV) and deep optical spectroscopic surveys have revealed an unexpectedly large number of very blue galaxies. The colors and luminosities of these objects indicate that they are dwarf galaxies…
After decades of efforts, optical long-baseline interferometry has become a mainstream observational technique in terms of operation robustness and user friendliness. Interferometry has opened a new observational window, enabling…
In this study, we conduct a pilot program aimed at the red supergiant population of the Magellanic Clouds. We intend to extend the current known sample to the unexplored low end of the brightness distribution of these stars, building a more…
We present preliminary results on Herschel/PACS mid/far-infrared photometric observations of INTEGRAL supergiant High Mass X-ray Binaries (HMXBs), with the aim of detecting the presence and characterizing the nature of absorbing material…
New constraints on the large-scale wind structures responsible for discrete absorption components are obtained from far-ultraviolet time-series observations of O supergiants in the Large Magellanic Cloud.
Extremely broad emission wings at H$\beta$ and H$\alpha$ have been found in VFTS data for five very luminous BA supergiants in or near 30 Doradus in the Large Magellanic Cloud. The profiles of both lines are extremely asymmetrical, which we…
The existence of faint blue stars far above the galactic plane, which have spectra that are similar to nearby Population I B stars, present several interesting questions. Among them are: Can a Population I B star travel from the disk to a…
Context. HD 85567 is an enigmatic object exhibiting the B[e] phenomenon, i.e. an infrared excess and forbidden emission lines in the optical. The object's evolutionary status is uncertain and there are conflicting claims that it is either a…
X-ray observations of galaxies have grown from a curiosity into a full-fledged field of astronomy. These observations provide unique information on black holes, binary stars, and the hot phase of the ISM, which can be used to constrain the…
Interstellar dust is a key physical ingredient of galaxies, obscuring star formation, regulating the heating and cooling of the gas, and building-up chemical complexity. In this manuscript, I give a wide review of interstellar dust…
I briefly describe some results about luminous distant dusty galaxies obtained in the 5 years since sensitive two-dimensional bolometer array cameras became available. The key requirements for making additional progress in understanding the…
This article gives an overview of the constitution, physical conditions and observables of dust in the interstellar medium of nearby galaxies. We first review the macroscopic, spatial distribution of dust in these objects, and its…
The broad absorption line (BAL) features seen in a small fraction of quasar optical/UV spectra are attributed to bulk outflows away from the quasar core. Observational evidence suggests that dust plays a key role in these systems, although…
Measuring distances to galaxies, determining their chemical composition, investigating the nature of their stellar populations and the absorbing properties of their interstellar medium are fundamental activities in modern extragalactic…
A supergiants are objects in transition from the blue to the red (and vice versa) in the uppermost HRD. They are the intrinsically brightest "normal" stars at visual light with absolute visual magnitudes up to -9. They are ideal to study…