Related papers: Dusty, Self-obscured Transients from Stellar Coale…
The presence of planets in binary systems poses interesting problems for planet formation theories, both in cases where planets must have formed in very compact discs around the individual stars and where they are located near the edge of…
The progenitors of SN 2008S and the 2008 transient in NGC300 were dust-enshrouded, with extremely red mid-infrared (MIR) colors and relatively low luminosities. The transients were optically faint (-13 < M_V < -15) compared to normal…
We find the distribution of coalescence times, birthrates, spatial velocities, and subsequent radial offsets of coalescing neutron stars (NSs) in various galactic potentials accounting for large asymmetric kicks introduced during a…
The 'Great Dimming' of the prototypical red supergiant Betelgeuse, which occurred between December 2019 and April 2020, gives us unprecedented insight into the processes occurring on the stellar surface and in the inner wind of this type of…
If the background universe is observed through a significant amount of diffusely distributed foreground dust, then studies at optical wavelengths may be severely biased. Previous studies investigating effects of foreground dust on…
By performing N-body simulations of chemodynamical evolution of galaxies with dusty starbursts, we investigate photometric evolution of gas-rich major mergers in order to explore the nature of ultraluminous infrared galaxies (ULIRGs) with…
We numerically investigate how fundamental properties of the spectral energy distribution (SED) of a major gas-rich galaxy merger with dusty starburst are determined by the initial orbital configuration of the merger. We found that an…
The majority of stars are part of gravitationally bound stellar systems, such as binaries. Observations of protobinary systems constrain the conditions that lead to stellar multiplicity and subsequent orbital evolution. We report…
The possibility that long tidal tails formed during compact object mergers may power optical transients through the decay of freshly synthesized r-process material is investigated. Precise modeling of the merger dynamics allows for a…
Supermassive black holes reside in cores of galaxies, where they are often surrounded by a nuclear cluster and a clumpy torus of gas and dust. Mutual interactions can set some stars on a plunging trajectory towards the black hole. We model…
We investigate the long-term evolution and observability of remnants originating from the merger of compact binary systems and discuss the differences to supernova remnants. Compact binary mergers expel much smaller amounts of mass at much…
Numerical simulations have shown that the often cited radiation pressure barrier to accretion onto massive stars can be circumvented, when the radiation field is highly anisotropic in the presence of a circumstellar accretion disk with high…
Recent observations have revealed that protoplanetary discs often exhibit cavities and azimuthal asymmetries such as dust traps and clumps. The presence of a stellar binary system in the inner disc regions has been proposed to explain the…
Massive black hole binaries are naturally predicted in the context of the hierarchical model of structure formation. The binaries that manage to lose most of their angular momentum can coalesce to form a single remnant. In the last stages…
We investigate when and how a dusty starburst galaxy merger can be heavily obscured by dust and consequently becomes an ultra-luminous infrared galaxy (ULIRG), based on numerical simulations of chemodynamical and photometric evolution of…
A new link in the causal mapping between massive stars and potentially fatal explosive transients opened with the 2008 discovery of the dust-obscured progenitors of the luminous outbursts in NGC 6946 and NGC 300. Here we carry out a…
Globular clusters contain many stars with surface abundance patterns indicating contributions from hydrogen burning products, as seen in the anti-correlated elemental abundances of e.g. sodium and oxygen, and magnesium and aluminium.…
Double compact objects (neutron stars and black holes) found in binaries with small orbital separations are known to spiral in and are expected to coalesce eventually because of the emission of gravitational waves. Such inspiral and merger…
The dust size distribution in molecular clouds can be strongly affected by ice-mantle formation and (subsequent) grain coagulation. Following previous work where the dust size distribution has been calculated from a state-of-the art…
We obtained late-time optical and near-IR imaging of SN 2008S with the Large Binocular Telescope (LBT). We find that (1) it is again invisible at optical (UBVR) wavelengths to magnitude limits of approximately 25 mag, and (2) while detected…