Related papers: Blue Loops, Cepheids, and Forays into Axions
Observations of Cepheids in the Large Magellanic Cloud, made over the last several decades, allow us to search for evolutionary period changes. None of the Cepheid from our sample of 378 stars stopped pulsating. Also none of them showed a…
The treatment of convective boundaries remains an important source of uncertainty within stellar evolution, with drastic implications for the thermally-pulsing stars on the Asymptotic Giant Branch (AGB). Various sources are taken as…
Galaxies evolve through a dynamic exchange of material with their immediate surrounding environment, the so-called circumgalactic medium (CGM). Understanding the physics of gas flows and the nature of the CGM is thus fundamental to studying…
While convection has been known to play a key role in stars for many decades, its implementation in one-dimensional stellar evolution codes still represents a major uncertainty today. The purpose of this work is to investigate the impact of…
Massive stars can explode in powerful supernovae (SNe) forming neutron stars but they may also collapse directly into black holes (BHs). Understanding and predicting their final fate is increasingly important, e.g, in the context of…
The effect of metallicity on the theoretical and empirical period-luminosity (PL) relations of Cepheid variables is not well understood and remains a highly debated issue. Here, we examine empirical colour-magnitude diagrams (CMDs) of…
Despite major progress in our understanding of massive stars, concerning discrepancies still remain between observations and theory. Most notable are the numerous stars observed beyond the theoretical main sequence, an evolutionary phase…
Based on consistent evolutionary and pulsation calculations, we analyse the effect of metallicity and of different convection treatments in the stellar models on period - magnitude, - color and - radius relationships. In order to perform an…
A new fine grid of nonlinear convective pulsation models for the so-called "bump Cepheids" is presented to investigate the Hertzprung progression (HP) phenomenon shown by their light and radial pulsation velocity curves. The period…
Convective boundary mixing (CBM) in the advanced evolutionary stages of massive stars is not well understood. Structural changes caused by convection have an impact on the evolution as well as the subsequent supernova, or lack thereof. The…
The $\beta$ Cephei stars represent an important class of massive star pulsators probing the evolution of B-type stars and the transition from main sequence to hydrogen-shell burning evolution. By understanding $\beta$ Cep stars, we gain…
We have examined the ratio of blue to red (B/R) supergiants in the dwarf irregular galaxy Sextans A. The supergiants were identified in previously published stellar photometry measured from Hubble Space Telescope imaging. The high…
In the next few years Advanced LIGO (aLIGO) may see gravitational waves (GWs) from thousands of black hole (BH) mergers. This marks the beginning of a new precision tool for physics. Here we show how to search for new physics beyond the…
We perform two-dimensional numerical simulations of core convection for zero-age-main-sequence stars covering a mass range from 3 $M_\odot$ to 20 $M_\odot$. The simulations are performed with the fully compressible time-implicit code MUSIC.…
Ultra-light particles, such as axions, form a macroscopic condensate around a highly spinning black hole by the superradiant instability. Due to its macroscopic nature, the condensate opens the possibility of detecting the axion through…
We aim to combine asteroseismology, spectroscopy, and evolutionary models to establish a comprehensive picture of the evolution of Galactic blue supergiant stars (BSG). To start such an investigation, we selected three BSG candidates for…
Context. Current implementations of mass loss for hot, massive stars in stellar evolution models include a sharp increase in mass loss when blue supergiants become cooler than Teff 20-22kK. This drastic mass-loss jump has been motivated by…
A massive star can enter the blue supergiant region either evolving directly from the main-sequence, or evolving from a previous red supergiant stage. The fractions of the blue supergiants having different histories depend on the internal…
We utilize nonlinear pulsation models to reproduce the observed light and color curves for two samples of bump Cepheid variables, 19 from the Large Magellanic Cloud and 9 from the Small Magellanic Cloud. This analysis determines the…
Spinning black holes can transfer a significant fraction of their energy to ultralight bosonic fields via superradiance, condensing them in a co-rotating structure or "cloud". This mechanism turns black holes into powerful particle…