Related papers: The secular evolution of planetary nebula IC 418 a…

The goal of this study is to reconstruct the evolution and the dust formation processes during the final AGB phases of a sample of carbon-rich, post-AGB Galactic stars, with particular attention to the determination of the past mass-loss…

A project which aims to understand the abundance patterns of He, C, N, O, Ne, S, and Ar for a small sample of planetary nebulae is described. Abundance ratios of O/H, C/O, and N/O especially show a broad range relative to their solar…

Detailed atmospheric abundances have been calculated for a sample of A-G supergiant stars with IR fluxes and/or high galactic latitudes. HD 172481 and HD 158616 show clear indications of being post-AGB stars that have experienced third…

We present a detailed study of the evolution of massive stars of masses 15, 20, 25 and 30 $\msun$ assuming solar-like initial chemical composition. The stellar sequences were evolved through the advanced burning phases up to the end of core…

A number of late [WC] stars have unique infrared properties, not found among the non-[WC] planetary nebulae, and together define a class of IR-[WC] stars. They have unusual IRAS colours, resembling stars in the earliest post-AGB evolution…

Carbon (C) is thought to be produced by both core collapse supernovae (CCSN) and asymptotic giant branch (AGB) stars, but the relative contributions of these two sources are uncertain. We investigate the astrophysical origin of C using…

We present new theoretical stellar evolutionary models of metal-rich asymptotic giant branch (AGB) stars. Stellar models are evolved with initial masses between 1Msun and 7Msun at Z=0.007, and 1Msun and 8Msun at Z=0.014 (solar) and at…

We investigate the evolution of oxygen- and carbon-rich AGB stars, post-AGB objects, and planetary nebulae using data collected mainly from the MSX catalogue. Magnitudes and colour indices are compared with those calculated from a grid of…

We study the chemical abundances of a wide sample of 142 Galactic planetary nebulae (PNe) with good quality observations, for which the abundances have been derived more or less homogeneously, thus allowing a reasonable comparison with…

About a quarter of all post-asymptotic giant branch (AGB) stars are hydrogen-deficient. Stellar evolutionary models explain the carbon-dominated H-deficient stars by a (very) late thermal pulse scenario where the hydrogen-rich envelope is…

We investigate the physical and chemical evolution of population II stars with initial masses in the range 6.5-8 Msun, which undergo an off centre carbon ignition under partially degenerate conditions, followed by a series of thermal…

Structural and chemical changes during the AGB and post-AGB evolution are discussed with respect to two recent observational and theoretical findings. On the one hand, high-resolution infrared observations revealed details of the dynamical…

Stars of intermediate mass (~4-8Msun) evolve to the stage of white dwarfs through the asymptotic giant branch (AGB) stage: stationary hydrogen shell burning and helium thermal pulses, wind mass loss and planetary nebula ejection. Almost the…

Sakurai's object (V4334 Sgr) is a born again AGB star following a very late thermal pulse. So far no stellar evolution models have been able to explain the extremely fast evolution of this star, which has taken it from the pre-white dwarf…

For 32 central stars of PNe we present their parameters interpolated among the new evolutionary sequences. The derived stellar final masses are confined between 0.53 and 0.58 $M_\odot$ in good agreement with the peak in the white dwarf mass…

SAO244567, the exciting star of the Stingray nebula, is rapidly evolving. Previous analyses suggested that it has heated up from an effective temperature of about 21kK in 1971 to over 50kK in the 1990s. Canonical post-asymptotic giant…

The dissociation and subsequent ionisation of molecular material in a detached, spherically symmetric stellar wind is modelled as a star evolves from the post-asymptotic giant branch phase to a planetary nebula (i.e. from a stellar…

We study the late evolution of solar metallicity stars in the transition region between white dwarf formation and core collapse. This includes the super-asymptotic giant branch (super-AGB, SAGB) stars, which have massive enough cores to…

The stellar population stripped from galaxies in clusters evolve under the extreme conditions imposed by the intracluster (IC) medium. Intracluster stars generally suffer very high systemic velocities, and evolve within a rarefied and…

We are studying a class of binary post-AGB stars that seem to be systematically surrounded by equatorial disks and slow outflows. Although the rotating dynamics had only been well identified in three cases, the study of such structures is…