Related papers: Binary Stars in the New Millennium
Stars are mostly found in binary and multiple systems, as at least 50% of all solar-like stars have companions - a fraction that goes up to 100% for the most massive stars. Moreover, a large fraction of them will interact in some way or…
Binary stars are pairs of stars that are gravitationally bound, providing in some cases accurate measurements of their masses and radii. As such, they serve as excellent testbeds for the theory of stellar structure and evolution. Moreover,…
Planetary nebulae are traditionally considered to represent the final evolutionary stage of all intermediate-mass stars ($\sim$0.7-8Msol). Recent evidence seems to contradict this picture. In particular, since the launch of the Hubble Space…
Binary stars are dynamical systems formed by two stars that are physically bound by the gravitational force. Binary stars are privileged laboratories, allowing one to measure the fundamental properties of stars but also potentially changing…
Massive stars play a major role in the evolution of their host galaxies, and serve as important probes of the distant Universe. It has been established that the majority of massive stars reside in close binaries and will interact with their…
Stellar multiplicity is among the oldest and richest problems in astrophysics. Binary stars are a cornerstone of stellar mass and radius measurements that underpin modern stellar evolutionary models. Binaries are the progenitors of many of…
Binary systems have long been recognized as the source of powerful astrophysical diagnostics. Among the many applications of binary stars, they have been used as probes of stellar structure and evolution (both of single and binary stars) in…
Binary stars evolve differently from single stars, thus binary evolution is very useful for astrophysical studies. This paper discusses the application of binary evolution in the studies of stars, star clusters, galaxies, and cosmology. In…
Massive stars are essential to understand a variety of branches of astronomy including galaxy and star cluster evolution, nucleosynthesis and supernovae, pulsars and black holes. It has become evident that massive star evolution is very…
Stellar models of massive single stars are still plagued by major uncertainties. Testing and calibrating against observations is essential for their reliability. For this purpose one preferably uses observed stars that have never…
Binary stars are of course more than two stars, but they are also at least two stars. In this chapter we will review some aspects of the physics governing the evolution of single massive stars. We will also review the uncertainties of key…
Binary stars produce an array of dramatic astrophysical phenomena. They allow us to probe stellar structure, nuclear physics, and gravitational wave physics. They also produce the powerful supernovae that allow us to measure the scale of…
The study of binary stars is worth to undertake not only to learn more about the properties of binaries as such, but also because binaries are multi-purpose astrophysical tools. This paper reviews some of the ways this effective "tool" can…
Close binary central stars of planetary nebulae are key in constraining the poorly-understood common-envelope phase of evolution, which in turn is critical in understanding the formation of a wide-range of astrophysical phenomena (including…
Stellar astrophysicists are increasingly taking into account the effects of orbiting companions on stellar evolution. New discoveries, many thanks to systematic time-domain surveys, have underlined the role of binary star interactions in a…
Binary stars have long been considered to play a crucial role in globular cluster evolution, and offer the advantages of studying systems at the same, well-determined distances. However, early search attempts were consistently thwarted by…
Massive stars are among the most important objects in the Universe and many (most?) of them are formed in binaries. A selection of observational and theoretical facts that illustrate the importance of binaries and the evolution of massive…
It is now clear that central star binarity plays a key role in the formation and evolution of planetary nebulae, with a significant fraction playing host to close-binary central stars which have survived one or more common envelope…
We performed populations synthesis calculations of single stars and binaries and show that binary evolution is extremely important for Galactic astronomy. We review several binary evolution models and conclude that they give quite different…
Understanding the galaxy in which we live is one of the great intellectual challenges facing modern science. With the advent of high quality observational data, the chemical evolution modeling of our galaxy has been the subject of numerous…