Related papers: The Planetary Nebulae Luminosity Function (PNLF): …
The practice of measuring galaxy distances from their spatial fluctuations in surface brightness is now a decade old. While several past articles have included some review material, this is the first intended as a comprehensive review of…
Planetary nebulae are now well established as probes of galaxy dynamics and as standard candles in distance determinations. Motivated by the need to improve the efficiency of planetary nebulae searches and the speed with which their radial…
The Planetary Nebula Spectrograph is a dedicated instrument for measuring radial velocity of individual Planetary Nebulae (PNe) in galaxies. This new instrument is providing crucial data with which to probe the structure of dark halos in…
From as early as the 1930s, astronomers have tried to quantify the statistical nature of the evolution and large-scale structure of galaxies by studying their luminosity distribution as a function of redshift - known as the galaxy…
This review highlights the properties of the planetary nebulae in external galaxies as tracers of light, of the stellar population properties, and of the distances and kinematics of the parent galaxies. Recent results on the kinematics of…
Accurate distances to galaxies can be determined from the luminosities of stars at the Tip of the Red Giant Branch (TRGB). We use a Maximum Likelihood algorithm to locate the TRGB in galaxy color-magnitude diagrams. The algorithm is…
Planetary nebulae (PNe) are valuable spatial and kinematic tracers of nearby galaxies. In this mini-review, I focus on their role in tracing the halo and intra-cluster/intra-group light assembly in groups and clusters of galaxies within…
V-band luminosity functions have been obtained for the upper main-sequence, sub-giant branch and red giant branch of 18 galactic globular clusters from HST data. A comparison with four sets of theoretical models has been performed. In…
Measuring the distances to Galactic planetary nebulae (PNe) has been an intractable problem for many decades. We have now established a robust optical statistical distance indicator, the H$\alpha$ surface brightness- radius or S-r relation,…
Extragalactic planetary nebulae (PNe) offer a way to determine the distance to their host galaxies thanks to the nearly universal shape of the planetary nebulae luminosity function (PNLF). Accurate PNe distance measurements rely on…
A revival over the past two decades in planetary nebula (PN) morphological studies springs from a combination of factors, including the advent of wide-area, high dynamic range detectors; the growing archives of high resolution images from…
The study of extragalactic planetary nebulae (EPN) is a rapidly expanding field. The advent of powerful new instrumentation such as the PN spectrograph has led to an avalanche of new EPN discoveries both within and between galaxies. We now…
We report on a new measurement of the luminosity function (LF) and mass function (MF) of field low-mass dwarfs using Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) photometry. The final catalog is composed of ~15 million low-mass stars (0.1 Msun < M < 0.8…
For decades, the theoretical understanding of planetary nebulae (PNe) has remained in tension with the observed universal bright-end cutoff of the PN luminosity function (PNLF). The brightest younger PN populations have been observed to be…
We are using optical/IR surface brightness fluctuations (SBFs) to validate the latest stellar population synthesis models and to understand the stellar populations of ellipticals. Integrated light and spectra measure only the first moment…
Planetary nebulae (PNe) provide tests of stellar evolution, can serve as tracers of chemical evolution in the Milky Way and other galaxies, and are also used as a calibrator of the cosmological distance ladder. Current and upcoming large…
The Local Group (LG) represents the best environment to study in detail the PN population in a large number of morphological types of galaxies. The closeness of the LG galaxies allows to investigate the faintest side of the PN luminosity…
I review the Globular Cluster Luminosity Function (GCLF) with emphasis on recent observational data and theoretical progress. As is well known, the turn-over magnitude (TOM) is a good distance indicator for early-type galaxies within the…
A historical perspective on the study of asymmetries in planetary nebulae (PNs) is presented. We also describe our ongoing work in high resolution spectroscopy of planetaries, and discuss some likely future directions for the study of…
This paper - the first of a short series dedicated to the long-stan ding astronomical problem of de-projecting the bi-dimensional apparent morpholog y of a three-dimensional mass of gas - focuses on the density distribution in real…