Related papers: Can Star-Disk Collisions Explain the Missing Red G…
When the core hydrogen is exhausted during stellar evolution, the central region of a star contracts and the outer envelope expands and cools, giving rise to a red giant, in which convection occupies a large fraction of the star.…
Keplerian accretion discs around massive black holes (MBHs) are gravitationally unstable beyond a few hundredths of parsec and should collapse to form stars. Indeed an accretion/star formation episode took place a few millions years ago in…
Observations of massive stars within the central parsec of the Galaxy show that, while most stars orbit within a well-defined disc, a significant fraction have large eccentricities and / or inclinations with respect to the disc plane. Here,…
The color-magnitude diagrams of $\sim 7 \times 10^5$ stars obtained for 12 fields across the Galactic bulge with the OGLE project reveal a well-defined population of bulge red clump giants. We find that the distributions of the apparent…
The high occurrence rates of spiral arms and large central clearings in protoplanetary disks, if interpreted as signposts of giant planets, indicate that gas giants form commonly as companions to young stars ($<$ few Myr) at orbital…
We study the evolution and observability of young compact star clusters within about 200pc of the Galactic center. Calculations are performed using direct N-body integration on the GRAPE-4, including the effects of both stellar and binary…
The origin of the population of very massive stars observed within $\sim 0.4$ pc of the supermassive black hole in the Galactic Centre is a mystery. Tidal forces from the black hole would likely inhibit {\it in situ} star formation whilst…
The detection of mixed modes in red giants with space missions CoRoT and Kepler has revealed their deep internal structure. These modes allow us to characterize the pattern of pressure modes (through the measurement of their asymptotic…
The near-infrared behavior of the red giant branch (RGB hereafter) as a function of abundance is examined with an unprecedented large sample of 27 Galactic globular clusters with Two Micron All Sky Survey photometry. We propose a new…
In the local (redshift z~0) Universe, collisional ring galaxies make up only ~0.01% of galaxies and are formed by head-on galactic collisions that trigger radially propagating density waves. These striking systems provide key snapshots for…
Numerical simulations of the dynamical friction suffered by a star cluster near the Galactic center have been performed with a parallelized tree code. Gerhard (2001) has suggested that dynamical friction, which causes a cluster to lose…
We investigate the evolution of initial fractal clusters at 3 kpc from the Galactic Center (GC) of the Milky Way and show how red supergiant clusters (RSGCs)-like objects, which are considered to be the result of active star formation in…
We used red clump stars to measure the surface mass density of the Galactic disk in the solar neighbourhood. High resolution spectra of red clump stars towards the NGP have been obtained with the ELODIE spectrograph at OHP for Tycho-2…
We investigate the effect of star formation and diffuse photoelectric heating on the properties of giant molecular clouds (GMCs) formed in high resolution (~< 10 pc) global (~ 20 kpc) simulations of isolated Milky Way-type galaxy disks. The…
The combination of asteroseismologically-measured masses with abundances from detailed analyses of stellar atmospheres challenges our fundamental knowledge of stars and our ability to model them. Ancient red-giant stars in the Galactic…
Massive star-forming clumps are a prominent feature of high-redshift galaxies and are thought to trace gravitational fragmentation, feedback, and bulge growth in gas-rich disks. We present a statistical analysis of clumps in $\sim$3600…
We present a simple model for the number distribution of maximally star-forming clumps in rotating disk galaxies, at high-$z$ with high gas surface densities. By combining assumptions surrounding marginal stability of disks against…
Tens of thousands of red giant stars in the Kepler data exhibit solar-like oscillations. Their oscillations enable us to study the internal physics from core to surface, such as differential rotation. However, envelope rotation rates have…
We study the effects of stellar collisions, particularly on feeding massive black holes (BHs) and color gradients, in realistic galactic centers. We find that the mass released by stellar collisions is not sufficient to account for the…
We measure the mass growth rate by merging for a wide range of galaxy types. We present the small-scale (0.014 < r < 11 h70^{-1} Mpc) projected cross-correlation functions w(rp) of galaxy subsamples from the spectroscopic sample of the NYU…