Related papers: The sdA problem I: Physical Properties
White dwarfs are the dense, burnt-out remnants of the vast majority of stars, condemned to cool over billions of years as they steadily radiate away their residual thermal energy. To first order, their atmosphere is expected to be made…
The combination of photometry, spectroscopy and spectropolarimetry of the chemically peculiar stars often aims to study the complex physical phenomena such as stellar pulsation, chemical inhomogeneity, magnetic field and their interplay…
A selection of 17 stars in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, previously identified as DC class white dwarfs (WDs), has been reported to show spectra very close to blackbody radiation in the wavelength range from ultraviolet to infrared. Due to…
The local power law relationship between the surface densities of neutral hydrogen gas and star formation rate (SFR) can be used to explore the SFR properties of damped Lyman alpha (DLA) systems at higher redshift. We find that while the…
AA Dor is an eclipsing, post common-envelope binary with an sdOB-type primary and an unseen low-mass secondary, believed to be a brown dwarf. Eleven years ago, a NLTE spectral analysis of the primary showed a discrepancy with the surface…
White dwarfs represent the endpoint of stellar evolution for stars with initial masses between approximately 0.07 msun and 8-10 msun, where msun is the mass of the Sun (more massive stars end their life as either black holes or neutron…
We present the results of quantitative spectral analysis of sdOs from the SDSS database. Fitting the Balmer, HeI and HeII lines to non-LTE model spectra, we derived their effective temperatures, surface gravities and helium abundances. We…
Hydrogen deficient stars include the cool R CrB variable (RCBs) and hydrogen-deficient carbon (HdCs) giants through extreme helium stars (EHes) to the very hot helium-rich subdwarfs (He-sdO and O(He) stars) and white dwarfs. With surfaces…
A galaxy's mean metallicity is usually closely correlated with its luminosity and mass. Consequently the most metal-poor galaxies in the local universe are dwarf galaxies. Blue compact dwarfs and tidal dwarfs tend to deviate from the…
Early-type dwarfs (ETDs) are the end points of the evolution of low-mass galaxies whose gas supply has been extinguished. The cessation of star-formation lays bare the ancient stellar populations. A wealth of information is stored in the…
We discuss how knowledge of the whole evolutionary history of dwarf galaxies, including details on the early star formation events, can provide insight on the origin of the different dwarf galaxy types. We suggest that these types may be…
We present evidence that there is an M dwarf problem similar to the previously identified G dwarf and K dwarf problems: the number of low-metallicity M dwarfs is not sufficient to match simple closed-box models of local Galactic chemical…
We derive the star formation histories of eight dwarf spheroidal (dSph) Milky Way satellite galaxies from their alpha element abundance patterns. Nearly 3000 stars from our previously published catalog (Paper II) comprise our data set. The…
We present a statistical parallax study of nearly 2,000 M subdwarfs with photometry and spectroscopy from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. Statistical parallax analysis yields the mean absolute magnitudes, mean velocities and velocity…
The early chemical evolution of the Galaxy and the Universe is vital to our understanding of a host of astrophysical phenomena. Since the most metal-poor Galactic stars (with metallicities down to [Fe/H]\sim-5.5) are relics from the…
In this paper we analyze the kinematics, chemistry, and physical properties of a sample of the most metal-poor damped Lyman-alpha systems (DLAs), to uncover their links to modern-day galaxies. We present evidence that the DLA population as…
We present a sample of 74,216 M and L dwarfs constructed from two existing catalogs of cool dwarfs spectroscopically identified in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS). We cross-matched the SDSS catalog with Gaia DR2 to obtain parallaxes and…
Multiple radial velocity observations have been obtained for a large sample of local field subdwarf B (sdB) stars over a period of two years. SdB stars appear to fall into three distinct groups based on their kinematic and spectroscopic…
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…
Comparison of our chemically consistent models for spiral galaxies with observed DLA abundances shows that at high redshift DLA galaxies may well be the progenitors of normal spiral disks of all types from Sa through Sd. Towards lower…