Related papers: Duplicity: its part in the AGB's downfall
I propose that some irregular `messy' planetary nebulae owe their morphologies to triple-stellar evolution where tight binary systems evolve inside and/or on the outskirts the envelope of asymptotic giant branch (AGB) stars. In some cases…
In 1981, the idea of a superwind that ends the life of cool giant stars was proposed. Extreme OH/IR-stars develop superwinds with the highest mass-loss rates known so far, up to a few 10^(-4) Msun/yr, informing our understanding of the…
Asymptotic Giant Branch (AGB) winds from evolved stars not only provide a non-trivial amount of mass and energy return, but also produce dust grains in massive elliptical galaxies. Due to the fast stellar velocity and the high ambient…
We investigate the consequences of magnetic flares on the surface of asymptotic giant branch (AGB) and similar stars. In contrast to the solar wind, in the winds of AGB stars the gas cooling time is much shorter than the outflow time. As a…
We report the results of an exploratory program to image the extended circumstellar envelopes of asymptotic giant branch (AGB) stars in dust-scattered galactic light. The goal is to characterize the morphology of the envelopes as a probe of…
A popular self--enrichment scenario for the formation of globular clusters assumes that the abundance anomalies shown by the stars in many clusters are due to a second stage of star formation occurring from the matter lost by the winds of…
Binarity is believed to dramatically affect the history and geometry of mass loss in AGB and post-AGB stars, but observational evidence of binarity is sorely lacking. As part of a project to search for hot binary companions to cool AGB…
Winds of AGB stars are thought to be driven by a combination of pulsation-induced shock waves and radiation pressure on dust. In dynamic atmosphere and wind models, the stellar pulsation is often simulated by prescribing a simple sinusoidal…
The recent progress in high-spatial-resolution techniques, spanning wavelengths from the visual to the radio regime, is leading to new valuable insights into the complex dynamical atmospheres of Asymptotic Giant Branch (AGB) stars and their…
In the course of a systematic exploration of the uncertainties associated to the input micro- and macro-physics in the modeling of the evolution of intermediate mass stars during their Asymptotic Giant Branch (AGB) phase, we focus on the…
Stars are mostly found in binary and multiple systems, as at least 50% of all solar-like stars have companions - a fraction that goes up to 100% for the most massive stars. Moreover, a large fraction of them will interact in some way or…
The Asymptotic Giant Branch (AGB) phase is very short but its importance is seen in its nucleosynthesis. A revolution in stellar modelling has taken place in the last 20 years, inspired jointly by this rich nucleosynthesis and partly by new…
Lithium is made up in the envelopes of massive Asymptotic Giant Branch (AGB) stars through the process of Hot Bottom Burning. In Globular Clusters, this processing is one possible source of the hot-CNO burning whose nuclear products are…
The binary characteristics of asymptotic giant branch (AGB) stars are imprinted in the asymmetric patterns of their circumstellar envelopes. We develop a simple method for constraining the orbital parameters of such binary stars from the…
Low- and intermediate-mass stars go through a period of intense mass-loss at the end of their lives in a phase known as the asymptotic giant branch (AGB). During the AGB a significant fraction of their initial mass is expelled in a stellar…
The material lost through stellar winds of Asymptotic Giant Branch (AGB) stars is one of the main contributors to the chemical enrichment of galaxies. The general hypothesis of the mass loss mechanism of AGB winds is a combination of…
According to standard stellar evolution, lithium is destroyed throughout most of the evolution of low- to intermediate-mass stars. However, a number of evolved stars on the red giant branch (RGB) and the asymptotic giant branch (AGB) are…
Multiplicity is ubiquitous among massive stars. While the stellar components usually display similar masses, some binaries with extremely low mass ratios were also observed. Some of them are primordial, while others arise from binary…
Observations of the outflows of asymptotic giant branch (AGB) stars continue to reveal their chemical and dynamical complexity. Spherical asymmetries, such as spirals and disks, are prevalent and thought to be caused by binary interaction…
In some semi-detached binary systems, the donor star may transfer mass to the companion at a very high rate. We propose that, at sufficiently high mass-transfer rates such that the accretion disk around the companion becomes geometrically…