Related papers: Undetected Binary Stars Cause an Observed Mass Dep…
Two eclipsing binaries in the USco association have recently yielded precise values of masses and radii for 4 low-mass members of the association. Standard evolution models would require these dM4.5 - dM5 stars to have ages which are…
Various surveys of low-mass binaries in star forming regions have been performed in recent years. They reached opposite conclusions concerning possible binary excesses in some of these associations. I develop a consistent method to…
We analyse publicly available, individual spectra of four, massive ($M>10^{11}M_{\odot}$) early-type galaxies with redshifts in the range 1.4 < z < 2 to determine their stellar content, extending our previous work up to z~2. The wide…
The wide luminosity dispersion seen for stars at a given effective temperature in the H-R diagrams of young clusters and star forming regions is often interpreted as due to significant (~10 Myr) spreads in stellar contraction age. In the…
The majority of massive stars ($>8$ $\rm{M_{\odot}}$) in OB associations are found in close binary systems. Nonetheless, the formation mechanism of these close massive binaries is not understood yet. Using literature data, we measured the…
The Galactic centre stands out as the most prolific star-forming environment of the Galaxy when averaged over volume. In the last 30 million years, it has witnessed the formation of $\sim10^6 M_\odot$ of stars. However, crowding and high…
The rotation-mass-age relationship offers a promising avenue for measuring the ages of field stars, assuming the attendant uncertainties to this technique can be well characterized. We model stellar angular momentum evolution starting with…
We analyze 9 open clusters with ages in the range 70 Myr to 3.2 Gyr using UCAC2 proper motion data and 2MASS photometry. For each cluster we consider the projected velocity distributions in the core and off-core regions separately. In the…
We present photometric, astrometric, and spectroscopic observations of USco160611.9-193532 AB, a candidate ultrawide (~1600 AU), low-mass (M_tot~0.4 M_sun) multiple system in the nearby OB association Upper Scorpius. We conclude that both…
We conduct a multiplicity survey of members of the rho Ophiuchus cloud complex with high resolution imaging to characterize the multiple star population of this nearby star forming region and investigate the relation between stellar…
We present observations of three protoplanetary disks in visible scattered light around M-type stars in the Upper Scorpius OB association using the STIS instrument on the Hubble Space Telescope. The disks around stars 2MASS…
(ABRIDGED) We assess the systematic uncertainties in (young) cluster age, mass, and - to a lesser extent - extinction and metallicity determinations, based on broad-band imaging observations with the Hubble Space Telescope. Our aim here is…
We aim at constraining evolutionary models at low mass and young ages by identifying interesting transiting system members of the nearest OB association to the Sun, Upper Scorpius, targeted by the Kepler mission. We produced light curves…
Aims. GAIA delivers the positions and velocities of stars at unprecedented precision. Therefore, for star clusters, there exists much higher confidence in whether a specific star is a member of a particular group. However, membership…
We present results of a search for a young stellar moving group associated with the star HD 141569, a nearby, isolated Herbig AeBe primary member of a 5+/-3 Myr-old triple star system on the outskirts of the Sco-Cen complex. Our…
Observational tests of stellar and Galactic chemical evolution call for the joint knowledge of a star's physical parameters, detailed element abundances, and precise age. For cool main-sequence (MS) stars the abundances of many elements can…
In integrated-light, some color-color diagrams that use optical and near-infrared photometry show surprisingly orthogonal grids as age and metallicity are varied, and they are coming into common usage for estimating the average age and…
We analyze the spatial distributions of young stars in Taurus-Auriga and Upper Sco as determined from the two-point correlation function (i.e. the mean surface density of neighbors). The corresponding power-law fits allow us to determine…
The mean ages of early-type galaxies obtained from the analysis of optical spectra, give a mean age of 8 Gyr at z = 0, with 40% being younger than 6 Gyr. Independent age determinations are possible by using infrared spectra (5-21 microns),…
We investigate the spatial distribution, the space velocities and age distribution of the pre-main sequence (PMS) stars belonging to Ophiuchus, Lupus and Chamaeleon star-forming regions (SFRs), and of the young early-type star members of…