Related papers: Field Blue Stragglers and Related Mass Transfer Is…
The Gaia HR diagram shows the presence of apparently young stars at high tangential velocities. Using a simple analytical model I show that these stars are likely to be blue stragglers. Once normalized to red giant stars, the fraction of…
I was asked at the end of this conference to provide a few comments on the present status of the field of cosmic abundances, which I summarize (and extend upon) in this contribution. A discussion of the present ``state of play'' is given,…
The present status of superstring phenomenology is briefly discussed.
New views on the diffuse interstellar bands are discussed. In particular results from DIB surveys and the study of near-infrared DIBs.
Variability is a common characteristic of magnetically active stars. Flaring variability is usually interpreted as the observable consequence of transient magnetic reconnection processes happening in the stellar outer atmosphere. Stellar…
Blue straggler stars (BSSs) are stars observed to be hotter and bluer than other stars with the same luminosity in their environment. As such they appear to be much younger than the rest of the stellar population. Two main channels have…
I review recent observational progress concerning the evolution of the morphological distribution of galaxies in the rich cluster environment and in the faint field population. By coupling HST imagery with ground-based spectroscopic…
This paper discusses several most intruigung astrophysical implications connected with the possible absolute stability of strange quark matter.This is followed by a discussion of two astrophysical signals that may point at the existence of…
Our initial impressions of astronomical objects was that they are inherently "static" over the course of any reasonably long observation. However, with the discovery of quasars and their scintillation in 1963-64, we learnt that there are…
We used high-resolution spectra acquired with the multifiber facility FLAMES at the Very Large Telescope of the European Southern Observatory to investigate the chemical and kinematical properties of a sample of 22 Blue Straggler Stars…
Within the variety of objects populating stellar clusters, blue straggler stars (BSSs) are among the most puzzling ones. BSSs are commonly found in globular clusters, but they are also known to populate open clusters of the Milky Way. Two…
The present common view about GRB origin is related to cosmology. There are two evidences in favour of this interpretation. The first is connected with statistics, the second is based on measurements of the redshifts in the GRB optical…
A modified version of this paper is under process and with a new title and abstract. Hence, this version of the article is completely withdrawn.
Among the most striking feature of blue straggler stars (BSS) is the presence of multiple sequences of BSSs in the colour-magnitude diagrams (CMDs) of several globular clusters. It is often envisaged that such a multiple BSS sequence would…
The hydrodynamics of stellar collisions and mergers is discussed in the context of blue straggler formation. Emphasis is placed on the very important question of hydrodynamic mixing during the merger process. Recent results of…
We present an analysis of optical HST/STIS and HST/FOS spectroscopy of 6 blue stragglers found in the globular clusters M3, NGC6752 and NGC6397. These stars are a subsample of a set of ~50 blue stragglers and stars above the main sequence…
We present new Blue Straggler Star (BSS) catalogs in 38 Milky Way globular clusters (GCs) based on multi-passband and multi-epoch treasury survey data from the Hubble Space Telescope. We measure precise astrometry and relative proper…
Surface Brightness Fluctuations (SBFs) are one of the most powerful techniques to measure the distance and to constrain the unresolved stellar content of extragalactic systems. For a given bandpass, the absolute SBF magnitude \bar{M}…
Blue stragglers are anomalously massive core hydrogen-burning stars that, according to the theory of single star evolution, should not exist. They are suspected to form in mass-enhancement processes, involving binary evolution or stellar…
A critical discussion of our knowledge about extragalactic cosmic rays and magnetic fields is attempted. What do we know for sure? What are our prejudices? How do we confront our models with the observations? How can we assess the…