Related papers: From K giants to G dwarfs: stellar lifetime effect…
We have tested the reliability of the red giant branch (RGB) as a metallicity indicator accounting for observational errors as well as the complexity of star formation histories (SFHs) and chemical evolution histories observed in various…
Mass loss on the red giant branch (RGB) influences stellar evolution, properties of stellar populations, and Galactic chemical enrichment, yet remains poorly constrained observationally. Current models provide limited insight into how…
Red giants are an excellent tool for probing the history of star formation and subsequent metallicity evolution in the galaxies. The well-defined red giant branch (RGB) stars of the globular clusters can be used to determine their slopes…
Stellar population models with abundance distributions determined from the analytic Simple model of chemical evolution fail to match observations of the nuclei of bulge-dominated galaxies in three respects. First, the spectral energy…
The determination of stellar metallicity and its gradient in external galaxies is a difficult task, but crucial for the understanding of galaxy formation and evolution. The color of the Red Giant Branch (RGB) can be used to determine…
We report new spectroscopic observations obtained with the Michigan/Magellan Fiber System of 308 red giants (RGs) located in two fields near the photometric center of the bar of the Large Magellanic Cloud. This sample consists of 131 stars…
We examine the possibility of the inclusion of objects having lifetimes lower than the disk age in the database of recent determinations of the G dwarf metallicity distribution for the solar neighbourhood. As a preliminary step, stars with…
We present results from the largest CaII triplet line metallicity study of Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC) field red giant stars to date, involving 3037 objects spread across approximately 37.5 sq. deg., centred on this galaxy. We find a…
[Abridged] Ensemble studies of red-giant stars with exquisite asteroseismic, spectroscopic, and astrometric constraints offer a novel opportunity to recast and address long-standing questions concerning the evolution of stars and of the…
We present a revised metallicity distribution of dwarfs in the solar neighbourhood. This distribution is centred on solar metallicity. We show that previous metallicity distributions, selected on the basis of spectral type, are biased…
We present an empirical method to derive photometric metallicity, reddening and distance to old stellar populations by using a few major features of the Red Giant Branch (RGB) in near IR color magnitude diagrams. We combine the observed RGB…
Recent observations have revealed a population of $\alpha$-element abundances enhanced giant stars with unexpected high masses ($\gtrsim$1 $M_\odot$) from asteroseismic analysis and spectroscopy. Assuming single-star evolution, their masses…
We present an analysis of the many possible methods for simulating and analysing colour-magnitude diagrams, with application to studies of the field halo stellar populations of resolved galaxies. Special consideration is made to the…
The amount of mass lost by stars during the red-giant branch (RGB) phase is one of the main parameters to understand and correctly model the late stages of stellar evolution. Nevertheless, a fully-comprehensive knowledge of the RGB mass…
The thin red giant branch (RGB) of the Carina dwarf spheroidal galaxy appears at first sight quite puzzling and seemingly in contrast with the presence of several distinct bursts of star formation. In this Letter, we provide a measurement…
Wide-field JHKs near-infrared observations covering an area of 1.8x1.8 sq. deg. centred on M33 were obtained using WFCAM at UKIRT. These data show a large population of intermediate-age asymptotic giant branch stars (AGB). We have used both…
Galactic and extragalactic studies have shown that metal-rich globular clusters (GCs) are approximately three times more likely to host bright low-mass X-ray binaries (LMXBs) than metal-poor GCs. There is no satisfactory explanation for…
The chemical evolution of the Milky Way is investigated using a dual-phase metal-enriched infall model in which primordial gas fuels the earliest epoch of star formation, followed by the ongoing formation of stars from newly accreted gas.…
The so-called ``G-dwarf problem'' emerged in the 1960's when it was noticed that the observed metal distribution of nearby stars differs from what is expected in simple models of the evolution of the Galaxy. We have determined metallicities…
We present high quality near infrared Color Magnitude Diagrams of 10 Galactic Globular Clusters (GCs) spanning a wide metallicity range (-2.15<[Fe/H]<-0.2). This homogeneous data-base has been used to perform a detailed analysis of the Red…