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Recent detections of gravitational waves from merging binary black holes opened new possibilities to study the evolution of massive stars and black hole formation. In particular, stellar evolution models may be constrained on the basis of…
The Next Generation Space Telescope (NGST) will gather unprecedented spectro-photometric data on galaxies out to the highest redshifts. It is therefore crucial to identify the spectro-photometric diagnostics within reach of NGST, which will…
Over the past three decades, exoplanet research has delivered an extensive census of planets spanning a wide range of masses, sizes, and orbital configurations. Despite this progress, the physical interpretation of these populations remains…
The formation and evolution of galaxies is one of the great outstanding problems of astrophysics. Within the broad context of hierachical structure formation, we have only a crude picture of how galaxies like our own came into existence. A…
A survey of currently known planet-hosting stars indicates that approximately 25% of extrasolar planetary systems are within dual-star environments. Several of these systems contain stellar companions on moderately close orbits, implying…
The generation and evolution of dust in galaxies are important tracers for star formation, and can characterize the rest-frame ultraviolet to infrared emission from the galaxies. In particular understanding dust in high-redshift galaxies…
The internal properties of stars in the red-giant phase undergo significant changes on relatively short timescales. Long near-uninterrupted high-precision photometric timeseries observations from dedicated space missions such as CoRoT and…
Masking the horizontal branch and giant stars allows unambiguous measurements of mean age and metallicity in simple old stellar populations from metal and hydrogen line strengths. Billion year resolution is possible in the luminous halos of…
Knowledge of the binary population in stellar groupings provides important information about the outcome of the star forming process in different environments. Binarity is also a key ingredient in stellar population studies and is a…
Galaxy evolution is driven by many complex interrelated processes as galaxies accrete gas, form new stars, grow their stellar masses and central black holes, and subsequently quench. The processes that drive these transformations is poorly…
In their recent study, Labb\'e et al. used multi-band infrared images captured by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to discover a population of red massive galaxies that formed approximately 600 million years after the Big Bang. The…
In the present paper we discuss a selection of facts and questions related to observations and evolutionary calculations of massive single stars and massive stars in interacting binaries. We focus on the surface chemical abundances, the…
Globular star clusters are extremely important astrophysical objects since (1) they are prime laboratories for testing stellar evolution; (2) they are ``fossils'' from the epoch of galaxy formation, and thus important cosmological tools;…
We present constraints on the stellar-mass distribution of distant galaxies. These stellar-mass estimates derive from fitting population-synthesis models to the galaxies' observed multi-band spectrophotometry. We discuss the complex…
The formation environment of stars in massive stellar clusters is similar to the environment of stars forming in galaxies at a redshift of 1 - 3, at the peak star formation rate density of the Universe. As massive clusters are still forming…
We use data on the high-redshift evolution of the size distribution and luminosity function of galaxies to constrain the relationship between their star formation efficiency and starburst lifetime. Based on the derived scaling relations, we…
We investigate the stellar populations of a sample of Tidal Dwarf Galaxies, combining observations and evolutionary synthesis models to try and reveal their formation mechanism. On optical images we select a first sample of TDGs for which…
Many, possibly most, stars form in binary and higher-order multiple systems. Therefore, the properties and frequency of binary systems provide strong clues to the star-formation process, and constraints on star-formation models. However,…
All measurements of cosmic star formation must assume an initial distribution of stellar masses -- the stellar initial mass function -- in order to extrapolate from the star-formation rate measured for typically rare, massive stars (> 8…
A meta-analysis is performed of the literature on evolution in cosmic star-formation rate density from redshift unity to the present day. The measurements are extremely diverse, including radio, infrared, and ultraviolet broad-band…