Related papers: On the red-giant luminosity bump
To address the puzzling photometric properties of horizontal branch stars in Galactic GCs, several different groups have undertaken detailed spectroscopic analyses of individual blue HB stars. Hotter BHB stars show strong metal enhancement…
Blue horizontal-branch stars are Population II objects which are burning helium in their core and possess a hydrogen-burning shell and radiative envelope. Because of their low rotational velocities, diffusion has been predicted to work in…
In order to explain the spectroscopic observations of most of the galaxies in intermediate redshift clusters, bursts of star formation superimposed to the traditional scenario of galactic evolution are needed. The analysis of spectral lines…
We show that the small intrinsic spread in luminosities of red clump giants can be used to constrain the differences in the streaming motions of Galatic bulge stars on the near side and those on the far side. We propose two methods to…
The redshift dependence of the luminosity density in certain wavebands (e.g. UV and H-alpha) can be used to infer the history of star formation in the populations of galaxies producing this luminosity. This history is a useful datum in…
A gamma-ray burst (GRB) releases an amount of energy similar to that of a supernova explosion, which combined with its rapid variability suggests an origin related to neutron stars or black holes. Since these compact stellar remnants form…
The mechanism behind the Long Secondary Period (LSP) observed in pulsating red giants still remains unknown. In this work, I investigate the connection between the Red Giant Branch and Asymptotic Giant Branch evolution and the appearance of…
Thanks to their usefulness in various fields of astrophysics (e.g. mixing processes in stars, chemical evolution of galaxies), the last few years have witnessed a large increase in the amount of abundance data for early-type stars. Two…
In low-mass Red Giant Branch (RGB) and Asymptotic Giant Branch (AGB) stars, anomalous mixing must transport material near the hydrogen-burning shell to the convective envelope. Recently, it was suggested that buoyant magnetic flux tubes…
Red supergiants (RSGs) represent a late evolutionary stage of massive stars. Recent observations reveal that the observed luminosity range of RSGs in young open clusters is wider than expected from single star evolution models. Binary…
Observations have revealed a relative paucity of red giant (RG) stars within the central 0.5pc in the Galactic Center (GC). Motivated by this finding we investigate the hypothesis that collisions of stars with a fragmenting accretion disk…
The evolution of massive stars even on the main sequence is not yet well understood. Due to the steep mass-luminosity relation, massive main sequence stars become very luminous. This brings their envelopes very close to the Eddington limit.…
In this series of papers, we address the long-standing question of why post-main-sequence stars expand into red giants (RGs) or red supergiants (RSGs). This paper aims to identify the key physical mechanism that drives stellar evolution…
We propose a simple analytic model to understand when star formation is time-steady versus bursty in galaxies. Recent models explain the observed Kennicutt-Schmidt relation between star formation rate and gas surface densities in galaxies…
We consider the blue loops in the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram that occur when intermediate-mass stars begin core helium burning. It has long been known that the excess of helium above the burning shell, the result of the contraction of the…
We study the brightness variations of galactic red supergiant stars using long-term visual light curves collected by the American Association of Variable Star Observers (AAVSO) over the last century. The full sample contains 48 red…
Most inhomogeneities in the chemical composition of GC stars are due to primordial enrichment. The model today most credited is that the winds lost by high mass Asymptotic Giant Branch (AGB) stars, evolving during the first $\simlt$200Myr…
Starbursts are important because they can serve as local analogs of the processes that were important in the origin and early evolution of galaxies and in the heating and chemical enrichment of the inter-galactic medium. They may also play…
We propose a new method to investigate the coefficient of the selective extinction, based on two band photometry. This method uses red clump stars as a means to construct the reddening curve. We apply this method to the OGLE color-magnitude…
The well-known light minima of stars with the R Coronae Borealis variability are caused by the formation of an additional circumstellar dust shell, the screening shell, inside the permanent shell. Under the assumption of uniform…