Related papers: Planetary Nebulae
We discuss the formation of globules in planetary nebulae, typified by those observed in the Helix Nebula. We show that the properties of the globules, their number, mass, separation, and overall geometry strongly support a scenario in…
Massive stars evolve across the HR diagram, losing mass along the way and forming a variety of ring nebulae. During the main sequence stage, the fast stellar wind sweeps up the ambient interstellar medium to form an interstellar bubble.…
The planets of our solar system formed from a gas-dust disk. However, there are some properties of the solar system that are peculiar in this context. First, the cumulative mass of all objects beyond Neptune (TNOs) is only a fraction of…
In the core accretion model of giant planet formation, a solid protoplanetary core begins to accrete gas directly from the nebula when its mass reaches about 5 earth masses. The protoplanet has at most a few million years to reach runaway…
The first stars to form in the history of the universe may have been powered by dark matter annihilation rather than by fusion. This new phase of stellar evolution may have lasted millions to billions of years. These dark stars can grow to…
Evolved stars dominate galactic spectra, enrich the galactic medium, expand to change their planetary systems, eject winds of a complex nature, produce spectacular nebulae and illuminate them, and transfer material between binary…
Hydrogen-deficient central stars of planetary nebula such as Wolf-Rayet and PG1159 central stars and some weak emission line stars are primarily composed of helium and carbon. This abundance is well explained by a scenario where a single…
The first stars in the Universe are predicted to have been much more massive than the Sun. Gravitational condensation accompanied by cooling of the primordial gas due to molecular hydrogen, yields a minimum fragmentation scale of a few…
In the nucleated instability picture of gas giant formation, the final stage is the rapid accretion of a massive gas envelope by a solid core, bringing about a tenfold or more increase in mass. This tends to trigger the scattering of any…
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…
Stars and other macroscopic objects may be surrounded by potentially large field configurations of very light scalars coupled to ordinary matter. If the star ends in a black hole, e.g. via a supernova or a neutron star merger, the source…
Repulsive interactions between neutrons in compact stellar cores cause luminosity and a steady outflow of hydrogen from stellar surfaces. Neutron repulsion in more massive compact objects made by gravitational collapse produces violent,…
I describe the current state of our knowledge of the mapping between the initial masses of stars and the compact objects -- particularly neutron stars and black holes -- that they produce. Most of that knowledge is theoretical in nature,…
We review work on the evolution of planetary nebulae and proto-planetaries via magneto-rotational mechanisms showing that a dynamo generated magnetic field can produce the energy and momentum needed to drive pPN and PNe outflows. Angular…
I conduct an analytical study of the interaction of jets, or a collimated fast wind (CFW), with a previously blown asymptotic giant branch (AGB) slow wind. Such jets (or CFWs) are supposedly formed when a compact companion, a main sequence…
We investigate the possible progenitors of the planetary nebulae (PNs) which populate the top 0.5 mag of the [O III] 5007 planetary nebula luminosity function (PNLF). We show that the absolute luminosity of the PNLF cutoff demands that the…
Immediately after they are born, neutron stars are characterized by an entropy per baryon of order unity and by the presence of trapped neutrinos. If the only hadrons in the star are nucleons, these effects slightly reduce the maximum mass…
The shaping of the nebula is currently one of the outstanding unsolved problems in planetary nebula (PN) research. Several mechanisms have been proposed, most of which require a binary companion. However, direct evidence for a binary…
A significant fraction of massive stars move at speed through the interstellar medium of galaxies. After their death as core collapse supernovae, a possible final evolutionary state is that of a fast rotating magnetised neutron star,…
We discuss the basic physical model and the relevant processes responsible for creating and shaping planetary nebulae out of a cool AGB wind envelope. We show that a hydrodynamical treatment along the upper AGB leads quite naturally to more…