Related papers: The Red and Yellow Hypergiants
Hot subluminous stars of spectral type B and O are core helium-burning stars at the blue end of the horizontal branch or have evolved even beyond that stage. Strikingly, the distribution in the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram of He-rich vs.…
The increase in luminosity as a star evolves on the red-giant branch is interrupted briefly when the hydrogen-burning shell reaches the vicinity of the composition discontinuity left behind from the first convective dredge-up. The…
We present two classes of stars with yet unknown evolutionary phase: the B[e] supergiants and the so-called unclassified B[e] stars. While the B[e] supergiants are luminous post-main sequence stars with high mass progenitors, not much is…
The activity of massive stars approaching core-collapse can strongly affect the appearance of the star and its subsequent supernova. Late-phase convective nuclear burning generates waves that propagate toward the stellar surface, heating…
The phenomenon of spectral mimicry refers to the fact that hypergiants and post-AGB supergiants - stars of different masses in fundamentally different stages of their evolution have similar optical spectra, and also share certain other…
Stars destroy lithium (Li) in their normal evolution. The convective envelopes of evolved red giants reach temperatures of millions of K, hot enough for the 7Li(p,alpha)4He reaction to burn Li efficiently. Only about 1% of first-ascent red…
Several conclusions have been reached over the last few years concerning high-redshift galaxies: (1) The excess of faint blue galaxies is due to dwarf galaxies. (2) Star formation peaks at redshifts z ~1-2. (3) It appears to occur piecemeal…
We report mid- to far-infrared imaging and photomety from 7 to 37 microns with SOFIA/FORCAST and 2 micron adaptive optics imaging with LBTI/LMIRCam of a large sample of red supergiants (RSGs) in four Galactic clusters; RSGC1,…
Observations in the near-infrared domain showed the presence of the flat core of bright late-type stars inside $\sim 0.5\,{\rm pc}$ from the Galactic center supermassive black hole (Sgr A*), while young massive OB/Wolf-Rayet stars form a…
Betelgeuse is the nearest red supergiant, one of the brightest stars in our sky, and statistically speaking it would be expected to be "typical". Yet it exhibits many features that seem "curious", to say the least. For instance it has a…
Massive stars are rare but of paramount importance for their immediate environment and their host galaxies. They lose mass from their birth through strong stellar winds up to their spectacular end of their lives as supernovae. The mass loss…
The mass loss mechanism of red supergiant stars is not well understood, even though it has crucial consequences for their stellar evolution and the appearance of supernovae that occur upon core-collapse. We argue that outgoing shock waves…
Blue straggler stars are unique main-sequence stars that appear more luminous, hotter, and therefore younger, than their coeval counterparts. In star clusters, these stars are located above the cluster turn-off in the Hertzsprung-Russell…
We discuss an interesting feature of the distribution of luminous blue variables on the H-R diagram, and we propose a connection with the bistability jump in the winds of early-type supergiants. There appears to be a deficiency of quiescent…
Supermassive primordial stars in hot, atomically-cooling haloes at $z \sim$ 15 - 20 may have given birth to the first quasars in the universe. Most simulations of these rapidly accreting stars suggest that they are red, cool hypergiants,…
Red supergiant stars (RSGs) are massive stars in a late stage of evolution, crucial for understanding stellar life cycles and Galactic structure. However, RSGs on the far side of our Galaxy have been underexplored due to observational…
Hot subdwarf (SD) stars are the stripped cores of red giant stars in transition to the white dwarf sequence. The B-type subdwarfs (sdB) are powered by helium fusion in the core, more evolved ones (sdO) by shell burning. Low mass SDs may…
We show that the spectrum of radial pulsation modes in luminous red giants consists of both normal modes and a second set of modes with periods similar to those of the normal modes. These additional modes are the red giant analogues of the…
Hot subdwarfs are considered to be the compact helium cores of red giants, which lost almost their entire hydrogen envelope. What causes this enormous mass loss is still unclear. Binary interactions are invoked and a significant fraction of…
In the Galactic center nuclear star cluster, bright late-type stars exhibit a flat or even a decreasing surface-density profile, while fainter late-type stars maintain a cusp-like profile. Historically, the lack of red giants in the…