Related papers: William Pendry Bidelman (1918-2011)
Thanks to the high spatial resolution provided by long baseline interferometry, it is possible to understand the complex circumstellar geometry around stars with the B[e] phenomenon. These stars are composed by objects in different…
In this Note, which is a sequel on the Indian amateur astronomer R.G. Chandra [Biswas2011a, Biswas2011b], we have presented some documents to reveal his three-decades relationship with the American Association for Variable Stars Observers…
Olivier Chesneau challenged several fields of observational stellar astrophysics with bright ideas and an impressive amount of work to make them real in the span of his career, from his first paper on P Cygni in 2000, up to his last one on…
I report some observations and calculations related to the new nearby brown dwarf at d = 2 pc discovered by Luhman (2013, ApJ Letters, in press; arXiv:1303.2401). I report archival astrometry and photometry of the new object from IRAS…
Stellar evolution theory is most uncertain for massive stars. For reliable predictions of the evolution of massive stars and their final fate, solid constraints on the physical parameters, and their changes along the evolution and in…
Observations at various wavelengths of late B-type stars exhibiting strong overabundances of the chemical elements Hg and Mn in their atmospheres indicate that these stars are frequently found in binary and multiple systems. We intend to…
The new photometric space-borne survey missions CoRoT and Kepler will be able to detect minute flux variations in binary stars due to relativistic beaming caused by the line-of-sight motion of their components. In all but very short period…
Planetary nebulae (PNe) represent the near endpoints of evolution for stars of initial mass $\sim$1-8 $M_\odot$, wherein the envelope of an asymptotic giant branch (AGB) star becomes photodissociated and ionized by high-energy radiation…
I review Stanley Mandelstam's many contributions to particle physics, quantum field theory and string theory covering the years 1955 through 1980. His more recent work will be reviewed by Nathan Berkovits. This is my contribution to the…
Only a handful of binary central stars of planetary nebulae (PNe) are known today, due to the difficulty of detecting their companions. Preliminary results from radial velocity surveys, however, seem to indicate that binarity plays a…
Recently, a widely publicized claim has been made that the Aboriginal Australians discovered the variability of the red star Betelgeuse in the modern Orion, plus the variability of two other prominent red stars: Aldebaran and Antares. This…
The semi-regular variable star Betelgeuse is undergoing an historical minimum of its brightness. An 8 year series of visual and V-band CCD observations started at the end of 2011 is presented and discussed. Visual methods for comparing…
Egbert Brieskorn died on July 11, 2013, a few days after his 77th birthday. He was an impressive personality who has left a lasting impression on all who knew him, whether inside or outside of mathematics. Brieskorn was a great…
On June 2, 2012 it would have been the eighty fifth birthday of Edwald Abramovitch Zavadskii (1927-2005), corresponding member of the National Academy of Sciences, brilliant experimental physicist and a person with a very uncommon and…
Asteroseismology is an exceptional tool for studying stars by using the properties of observed modes of oscillation. So far the process of performing an asteroseismic analysis of a star has remained somewhat esoteric and inaccessible to…
James Philip Elliott, one of the towering figures of nuclear physics of the second half of the twentieth century, died on the 21st of October 2008. Obituaries appeared in the British press but relatively little attention was paid by the…
This article describes the life and work of Willem Janszoon Blaeu (1571-1638), who founded one of history's greatest cartographic publishing firms in 1599. Mostly renowned as a cartographer, he also made terrestrial and celestial globes,…
We present the properties of the recently discovered class of variable stars, Blue Large-Amplitude Pulsators (BLAPs). These extremely rare, short-period pulsating objects were detected thanks to regular, high-cadence observations of…
In a recent paper, Vink et al. analyzed some spectropolarimetry data of O-type stars. Here we comment on our disagreement with some points presented in this paper, with the hope of helping to fully grasp the scientific implication of these…
We present a synthesis of the astronomical observations constraining the wavelength-dependent extinction, emission, and polarization from interstellar dust from UV to microwave wavelengths on diffuse Galactic sightlines. Representative…