Related papers: IR nebulae around bright massive stars as indicato…
Wolf-Rayet stars are advanced evolutionary stages of massive stars. Despite their large mass-loss rates and high wind velocities, none of them display a bow shock, although a fraction of them are classified as runaway. Our 2.5-D numerical…
We present Spitzer/IRS observations of a small sample of heavily obscured IRAS sources displaying both the infrared and OH maser emission characteristic of OH/IR stars on the asymptotic giant branch (AGB), but also radio continuum emission…
More than half of all main-sequence (MS) stars have one or more companions, and many of those with initial masses <8 M$_\odot$ are born in hierarchical triples. These systems feature two stars in a close orbit (the inner binary) while a…
Many classical Be stars acquire their very rapid rotation by mass and angular-momentum transfer in massive binaries. Short-lived intermediate-phase objects have only been discovered recently. Data archives and the literature have been…
We analyze a set of optical-to-near-infrared long-slit nuclear spectra of 16 infrared-luminous spiral galaxies. All of the studied sources present H$_2$ emission, which reflects the star-forming nature of our sample, and they clearly…
II Zw 40 is a starburst dwarf and merger product, and holds a radio-infrared supernebula excited by thousands of embedded OB stars. We present here observations of three aspects of the supernebula: maps of the K and KU radio continuum that…
The obvious lack of the binary stellar systems that contain neutron stars (NS) is observed at present. Partly it is caused by the fact that it is very difficult to detect neutron star in a binary system if this relativistic component does…
Hot subluminous stars of spectral type B and O are core helium-burning stars at the blue end of the horizontal branch or have evolved even beyond that stage. Strikingly, the distribution in the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram of He-rich vs.…
(abridged) As the favoured progenitors of long-duration gamma-ray bursts, massive stars may represent our best signposts of individual objects in the early Universe, but special conditions seem required to make these bursters, which might…
The origin of hot subdwarf B stars (sdBs) is still unclear. About half of the known sdBs are in close binary systems for which common envelope ejection is the most likely formation channel. Little is known about this dynamic phase of binary…
Galactic infrared (IR) bubbles, which have shell-like structures in the mid-IR wavelengths, are known to contain massive stars near their centers. IR bubbles in inner Galactic regions ($|$l$|\leq$ 65$^{\circ}$, $|$b$|\leq$ 1$^{\circ}$) have…
While there are a number of proposed formation channels for subsolar mass compact objects, including black holes formed primordially, or neutron stars that form in collapsar disks, there have yet to be any conclusive observations of such…
Diffuse interstellar bands comprise hundreds of absorption features in the ISM. Most DIBs are observed in the optical, but some are in the IR. We observed 76 early-type stars at R=50,000 and S/N ratios of several hundreds using CRIRES. We…
It is an observational fact that bulges of spiral galaxies contain a high fraction of old and metal-rich stars. Following this observational fact, we have investigated colors of 21 bulges hosted by a selected sample of high surface…
Much difficulty has so far prevented the emergence of a consistent scenario for the origin of Type Ib and Ic supernovae (SNe). Here, we follow a heuristic approach by examining the fate of helium stars in the mass range 4 to 12Msun, which…
N-body simulations have shown that the dynamical decay of the young (~1 Myr) Orion Nebula cluster could be responsible for the loss of at least half of its initial content of OB stars. This result suggests that other young stellar systems…
A sub-set of microquasars exhibit high peculiar velocity with respect to the local standard of rest due to the kicks they receive when being born in supernovae. The interaction between the radio plasma released by microquasar jets from such…
Massive stars drive the evolution of the interstellar medium through their radiative and mechanical energy input. After their birth, they form bubbles of hot gas surrounded by a dense shell. Traditionally, the formation of bubbles is…
We use N-body integration to follow the evolution of clusters of 200 binary systems with different initial half mass radii $R_{0.5}$. We also simulate single-star clusters. All clusters evolve according to the same $n(t)$ curve, where…
On the route towards merging neutron stars and stripped-envelope supernovae, binary population synthesis predicts a large number of post-interaction systems with massive stars that have stripped off their outer layers. Yet, observations of…