Related papers: Model physics in low-mass solar-type stars: atomic…
Chemical composition is an important factor that affects stellar evolution. The element abundance on the stellar surface evolves along the lifetime of the star because of transport processes, including atomic diffusion. However, models of…
Asteroseismic forward modelling techniques are being used to determine fundamental properties (e.g. mass, radius, and age) of solar-type stars. The need to take into account all possible sources of error is of paramount importance towards a…
In this last decade, our knowledge of evolutionary and structural properties of stars of different mass and chemical composition is significantly improved. This result has been achieved as a consequence of our improved capability in…
Accurate and precise values of radii and masses of stars are needed to correctly estimate properties of extrasolar planets. We examine the effect of uncertainties in stellar model parameters on estimates of the masses, radii and average…
In the era of large stellar spectroscopic surveys, there is emphasis on deriving not only stellar abundances but also ages for millions of stars. In the context of Galactic archeology, stellar ages provide a direct probe of the formation…
Metallicity is one of the crucial factors that determine stellar evolution. To characterize the properties of stellar populations one needs to know the fraction of stars forming at different metallicities. Knowing how this fraction evolves…
Despite the fact that the initial helium abundance is an essential ingredient in modelling solar-type stars, its abundance in these stars remains a poorly constrained observational property. This is because the effective temperature in…
In this last decade, our knowledge of evolutionary and structural properties of stars of different mass and chemical composition has significantly improved. This notwithstanding, updated stellar models are still affected by significant and,…
When modelling stars with masses larger than 1.2Msun with no observed chemical peculiarity, atomic diffusion is often neglected because, on its own, it causes unrealistic surface abundances compared with those observed. The reality is that…
The effect of atomic diffusion on the Main Sequence (MS) of metal-poor low mass stars is investigated. Since diffusion alters the stellar surface chemical abundances with respect to their initial values, one must ensure - by calibrating the…
To accurately measure a star's atmospheric parameters and chemical abundances, it is crucial to have high-quality spectra. Analysing the detailed chemical abundances of groups of stars can help us better understand nucleosynthesis, galactic…
We assess the systematic uncertainties in stellar evolutionary calculations for low- to intermediate-mass, main-sequence stars. We compare published stellar tracks from several different evolution codes with our own tracks computed using…
Magnetic activity changes the gravito-acoustic modes of solar-like stars and in particular their frequencies. There is an angular-degree dependence that is believed to be caused by the non-spherical nature of the magnetic activity in the…
Core overshoot is a large source of uncertainty in constructing stellar models. Whether the amount of overshoot is constant or mass dependent is not completely known, even though models sometimes assume a mass-based trend. In this work we…
The availability of asteroseismic constraints for a large sample of stars from the missions CoRoT and Kepler paves the way for various statistical studies of the seismic properties of stellar populations. In this paper, we evaluate the…
The distributions of a galaxy's gas and stars in chemical space encodes a tremendous amount of information about that galaxy's physical properties and assembly history. However, present methods for extracting information from chemical…
Some aspects of the systematic and statistical errors affecting grid-based estimation of stellar masses and radii have still not been investigated well. We study the impact on mass and radius determination of the uncertainty in the input…
We develop a theoretical framework that extracts a deeper understanding of galaxy formation from empirically-derived relations among galaxy properties by extending the main-sequence integration method for computing galaxy star formation…
Seismology of stars that exhibit solar-like oscillations develops a growing interest with the wealth of observational results obtained with the CoRoT and Kepler space-borne missions. In this framework, relations between asteroseismic…
During this last decade our knowledge of the evolutionary properties of stars has significantly improved. This result has been achieved thanks to our improved understanding of the physical behavior of stellar matter in the thermal regimes…