Related papers: The Spider Stellar Engine: a Fully Steerable Extra…
Stellar engines are hypothesized megastructures that extract energy from the host star, typically with the purpose of generating thrust and accelerating the stellar system. We explore the maximum potential speeds that could be realizable by…
The ease of interstellar rocket travel is an issue with implications for the long term fate of our own and other civilizations and for the much-debated number of technological civilizations in the Galaxy. We show that the physical barrier…
Eclipses and pulsations are the two primary ways in which the physical properties of stars can be deduced and used to improve our understanding of stellar theory. An obvious idea is to combine these two analyses into the study of pulsating…
The probability that an exoplanet transits its host star is high for planets in close orbits, but drops off rapidly for increasing semimajor axes. This makes transit surveys for planets with large semimajor axes orbiting bright stars…
The majority of stars more massive than the Sun is found in binary or multiple star systems and many of them will interact during their evolution. Specific interactions, where progenitors and post-mass transfer (MT) systems are clearly…
Spider pulsars are compact binary systems composed of a millisecond pulsar and a low-mass companion. The relativistic magnetically-dominated pulsar wind impacts onto the companion, ablating it and slowly consuming its atmosphere. The…
Stars play a key role in the evolution of the Universe, as sources of radiation, as dynamical engines, and as chemical factories. Outputs of stellar models are then central to various studies in astrophysics. Stellar physics links…
Most stars are in multiple systems, with the majority of those being binaries. A large number of planets have been confirmed in binary stars and therefore it is important to understand their formation and dynamical evolution. We perform…
Advanced civilizations capable of interstellar travel, if they exist, are likely to have advanced propulsion methods. Spaceships moving at high speeds would leave a particular signature which could be detected from Earth. We propose a…
Asteroseismology has become an indispensable method for measuring stellar ages and radii, while binary systems remain the most prevalent tool for determining stellar masses. The synergy of the two, namely pulsating stars in binary systems,…
It is widely believed that central star binarity plays an important role in the formation and evolution of aspherical planetary nebulae, however observational support for this hypothesis is lacking. Here, we present the most recent results…
The Class A stellar engine (also known as a Shkadov thruster) is a spherical arc mirror, designed to use the impulse from a star's radiation pressure to generate a thrust force, perturbing the star's motion. If this mirror obstructs part of…
Hierarchical triple stars are ideal laboratories for studying the interplay between orbital dynamics and stellar evolution. Both stellar wind mass loss and three-body dynamics cooperate to destabilise triples, which can lead to a variety of…
Eclipsing binary stars have long served as benchmark systems to measure fundamental stellar properties. In the past few decades, asteroseismology - the study of stellar pulsations - has emerged as a new powerful tool to study the structure…
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,…
The majority of pulsar population synthesis studies performed to date have focused on isolated pulsar evolution. Those that have incorporated pulsar evolution within binary systems have tended to either treat binary evolution poorly of…
Kepler, K2, TESS, and similar time-domain photometric projects, while designed with exoplanet detection in mind, are also well-suited projects for searches for large artificial structures orbiting other stars in the Galaxy. An effort to…
The majority of star formation results in binaries or higher multiple systems, and planets in such systems are constrained to a limited range of orbital parameters in order to remain stable against perturbations from stellar companions.…
The understanding and modeling of the structure and evolution of stars is based on statistical physics as well as on hydrodynamics. Today, a precise identification and proper description of the physical processes at work in stellar…
With the discovery over the last two decades of a large diversity of exoplanetary systems, it is now of prime importance to characterize star-planet interactions and how such systems evolve. We address this question by studying systems…