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Although rare, massive stars, being the main sources of ionizing radiation, chemical enrichment and mechanical energy in the Galaxy, are the most important objects of the stellar population. This review presents the many different aspects…
In astrophysics, we often aim to estimate one or more parameters for each member object in a population and study the distribution of the fitted parameters across the population. In this paper, we develop novel methods that allow us to take…
We discuss the present state of knowledge and thought concerning the spread in age found among Galactic globular clusters, with some discussion of the implications for what happened during the earliest stages of the formation of the Milky…
Determining precise stellar ages and masses for evolved giants is crucial for Galactic archaeology but challenged by spectral degeneracies. Gaia's low-resolution XP spectra offer a unique opportunity to infer these parameters on a massive…
Galaxy-scale strong lensing is a powerful tool in Astrophysics and Cosmology, enabling studies of massive galaxies' internal structure, their formation and evolution, stellar initial mass function, and cosmological parameters. In this…
This paper outlines astrophysical issues related to the long term fate of the universe. We consider the evolution of planets, stars, stellar populations, galaxies, and the universe itself over time scales which greatly exceed the current…
The IACOB spectroscopic survey of Galactic OB stars is an ambitious observational project aimed at compiling a large, homogeneous, high-resolution database of optical spectra of massive stars observable from the Northern hemisphere. The…
Stellar age measurements are fundamental to understanding a wide range of astronomical processes, including Galactic dynamics, stellar evolution, and planetary system formation. However, extracting age information from main-sequence stars…
We briefly review some constraints (Owing to the limited number of pages of present review, only a sub-sample of the topics discussed during the talk are briefly summarized. For the interested readers we are pleased to send them upon…
To ascertain whether photometric decompositions of galaxies into bulges and disks are astrophysically meaningful, we have developed a new technique to decompose spectral data cubes into separate bulge and disk components, subject only to…
Detached eclipsing double line spectroscopic binaries offer an opportunity to measure directly stellar parameters: mass, luminosity, radius, as well as the distance. The only non-trivial step is the need to determine surface brightness of…
At the turn of the decade we arguably move from the era of precision cosmology to the era of galaxy formation. One approach to this problem will be via the construction of comprehensive galaxy samples. In this review I take the opportunity…
Massive stars condition the evolution of the interstellar medium by the amount of energy released during their lives and especially by their deaths as supernova explosions. The vast amounts of spectroscopic data for massive stars provided…
We discuss the age of the stellar disks in the solar neighbourhood. After reviewing the various methods for age dating we discuss current estimates of the age of both the thin and the thick disk. We present preliminary results for…
Asteroseismology provides powerful means to probe stellar interiors. The oscillations frequencies are closely related to stellar interior properties via the density and sound speed profiles. Since these are tightly linked with the mass and…
The Gaia space project, planned for launch in 2011, is one of the ESA cornerstone missions, and will provide astrometric, photometric and spectroscopic data of very high quality for about one billion stars brighter than V=20. This will…
Red giant stars are perhaps the most important type of stars for Galactic and extra-galactic archaeology: they are luminous, occur in all stellar populations, and their surface temperatures allow precise abundance determinations for many…
Asteroseismology has the capability of delivering stellar properties which would otherwise be inaccessible, such as radii, masses and thus ages of stars. When this information is coupled with classical determinations of stellar parameters,…
The construction of all age indicators consists of certain basic steps which lead to the identification of the properties desirable for stellar age indicators. Prior age indicators for main sequence field stars possess only some of these…
Galactic Archeology is about exploring the Milky Way as a galaxy by, mainly, using its (old) stars as tracers of past events and thus figure out the formation and evolution of our Galaxy. I will briefly outline some of the key scientific…