Related papers: Astro2020: From Stars to Compact Objects: The Init…
Knowledge of protostellar evolution has been revolutionized with the advent of surveys at near-infrared to submillimeter wavelengths. This has enabled the bolometric luminosities and bolometric temperatures (traditional protostellar…
Gravitational microlensing may detect dark stellar remnants - black holes or neutron stars - even if they are isolated. However, it is challenging to estimate masses of isolated dark stellar remnants using solely photometric data for…
Accreting compact objects are crucial to understand several important astrophysical phenomena such as Type Ia supernovae, gravitational waves, or X-ray and $\gamma$-ray bursts. In addition, they are natural laboratories to infer fundamental…
High precision photometry and spectroscopy of low-mass stars reveal a variety of properties standard stellar evolution cannot predict. Rotation, an essential ingredient of stellar evolution, is a step towards resolving the discrepancy…
The observable characteristics and subsequent evolution of young stellar populations is dominated by their massive stars. As our understanding of those massive stars and the factors affecting their evolution improves, so our interpretation…
Mass is constantly being recycled in the universe. One of the most powerful recycling paths is via stellar mass-loss. All stars exhibit mass loss with rates ranging from ~10(-14) to 10(-4) M(sun) yr-1, depending on spectral type, luminosity…
The initial-final mass relation represents a mapping between the mass of a white dwarf remnant and the mass that the hydrogen burning main-sequence star that created it once had. The relation thus far has been constrained using a sample of…
The formation of massive objects via gravitational collapse is relevant both for explaining the origin of the first supermassive black holes and in the context of massive star formation. Here, we analyze simulations of the formation of…
Massive stars (M> 10Msun) end their lives with spectacular explosions due to gravitational collapse. The collapse turns the stars into compact objects such as neutron stars and black holes with the ejection of cosmic rays and heavy…
High precision photometry and spectroscopy of low-mass stars reveal a variety of properties standard stellar evolution cannot predict. Rotation, an essential ingredient of stellar evolution, is a step towards resolving the discrepancy…
This is a personal review of various issues related to massive photometric and astrometric searches. A complete inventory of variable stars down to almost any magnitude limit will improve our understanding of the stellar evolution and the…
The precision era of multi-messenger astronomy, together with modern astrophysical, cosmological, and gravitational wave observations, increasingly points toward the existence of a ``dark" sector that cannot be explained within the…
This chapter concentrates on the deaths of very massive stars, the events leading up to their deaths, and how mass loss affects the resulting death. The previous three chapters emphasized the theory of wind mass loss, eruptions, and core…
Episodic mass loss is not understood theoretically, neither accounted for in state-of-the-art models of stellar evolution, which has far-reaching consequences for many areas of astronomy. We introduce the ERC-funded ASSESS project…
We consider isolated compact remnants (ICoRs), i.e. neutrons stars and black holes that do not reside in binary systems and therefore cannot be detected as X-ray binaries. ICoRs may represent $\sim\,5$ percent of the stellar mass budget of…
Background: low-mass stars are the dominant product of the star formation process, and they trace star formation over the full range of environments, from isolated globules to clusters in the central molecular zone. In the past two decades,…
Optical interferometry provides us with a unique opportunity to improve our understanding of stellar structure and evolution. Through direct observation of rotationally distorted photospheres at sub-milliarcsecond scales, we are now able to…
We present the analysis of five black hole candidates identified from gravitational microlensing surveys. Hubble Space Telescope astrometric data and densely sampled lightcurves from ground-based microlensing surveys are fit with a…
Stars form from the gravitational collapse of dense molecular cloud cores. In the protostellar phase, mass accretes from the core onto a protostar, likely through an accretion disk, and it is during this phase that the initial masses of…
We present models for the complete life and death of a 60 solar mass star evolving in a close binary system, from the main sequence phase to the formation of a compact remnant and fallback of supernova debris. After core hydrogen…