Related papers: Neutron-Capture Element Abundances and Cosmochrono…
The cooling theory of neutron stars is corroborated by its comparison with observations of thermally emitting isolated neutron stars and accreting neutron stars in binary systems. An important ingredient for such an analysis is the age of…
Neutron stars are versatile in their application to studying various important aspects of fundamental physics, in particular strong-field gravity tests and the equation of state for super-dense nuclear matter at low temperatures. However,…
In the study of galaxy integrated light, if photometric indicators could extract age and metallicity information of high enough quality, photometry might be vastly more efficient than spectroscopy for the same astrophysical goals. Toward…
The abundance patterns of metal-poor stars provide us a wealth of chemical information about various stages of cosmic chemical evolution. In particular, these stars allow us to study the formation and evolution of the elements, and the…
Neutron stars are the densest, directly observable stellar objects in the universe and serve as unique astrophysical laboratories to study the behavior of matter under extreme physical conditions. This book chapter is devoted to describing…
Ever since the discovery of neutron stars it has been realized that they serve as probes of a physical regime that cannot be accessed in laboratories: strongly degenerate matter at several times nuclear saturation density. Existing nuclear…
We present new abundance observations of neutron-capture elements in Galactic stars. These include new Hubble Space Telescope (HST) detections of the elements Ge, Zr and Pt in a group of 11 halo stars. Correlations between these elements…
Large future galaxy cluster surveys, combined with cosmic microwave background observations, can achieve a high sensitivity to the masses of cosmologically important neutrinos. We show that a weak lensing selected sample of ~100,000…
A deep understanding of the Milky Way galaxy, its formation and evolution requires observations of huge numbers of stars. Stellar photometry, therefore, provides an economical method to obtain intrinsic stellar parameters. With the addition…
Methods to determine abundances of the elements in the atmospheres of F, G, and K stars with precisions of 0.01-0.03 dex are reviewed. Such high-precision stellar abundances have led to the discovery of unexpected phenomena and relations…
Rapid neutron-capture (i.e., r-process) nucleosynthesis calculations, employing internally consistent and physically realistic nuclear physics input (QRPA beta-decay rates and the ETFSI-Q nuclear mass model), have been made. These…
The aim of this work is to determine abundances of neutron-capture elements for thin- and thick-disc F, G, and K stars in several sky fields near the north ecliptic pole and to compare the results with the Galactic chemical evolution…
Neutron(n)-capture elements (atomic number Z>30), which can be produced in planetary nebula (PN) progenitor stars via s-process nucleosynthesis, have been detected in nearly 100 PNe. This demonstrates that nebular spectroscopy is a…
We propose a new neutron-capture site in early metal-poor and metal-free stars of $\sim 20$--$30 \,\mathrm{M}_\odot$ that results from proton ingestion in the He shell during late stages of the stars' lives. Most of the neutron capture…
Nucleocosmochronology involves the use of the abundances of radioactive nuclear species and their radiogenic decay daughters to establish the finite age of the elements and the time scale for their formation. While there exist radioactive…
We study the properties of neutron stars adopting relativistic equations of state of neutron star matter, calculated in the framework of the relativistic Brueckner-Hartree-Fock approximation for electrically charge neutral neutron star…
The presence of dark matter has been ascertained through a wealth of astrophysical and cosmological phenomena and its nature is a central puzzle in modern science. Elementary particles stand as the most compelling explanation. They have…
[ABRIDGED] The purpose of this work is to evaluate how several elements produced by different nucleosynthesis processes behave with stellar age and provide empirical relations to derive stellar ages from chemical abundances. We derive…
We investigate how current and proposed observations of neutron stars can lead to an understanding of the state of their interiors and the key unknowns: the typical neutron star radius and the neutron star maximum mass. A theoretical…
Planetary Nebulae (PNe) abundance patterns have long been used to note signatures of nuclear processing and to trace the distribution of metals throughout galaxies. We present abundance gradients and heavy element ratios based upon newly…