Related papers: Blue Supergiants as a Tool for Extragalactic Dista…
Extreme microlensing events, defined as events with maximum magnification $A_\max\gsim 200$ are a potentially powerful probe of the mass spectrum and spatial distribution of objects along lines of sight toward the Galactic bulge. About 75…
Gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) are the most luminous electromagnetic explosions in the Universe, which emit up to $8.8\times10^{54}$ erg isotropic equivalent energy in the hard X-ray band. The high luminosity makes them detectable out to the…
We are using optical/IR surface brightness fluctuations (SBFs) to validate the latest stellar population synthesis models and to understand the stellar populations of ellipticals. Integrated light and spectra measure only the first moment…
We present a quantitative spectroscopic study of 13 blue supergiant stars in the Pinwheel Galaxy M101, based on data obtained with the Low Resolution Imaging Spectrometer available at the Keck I telescope. The average stellar metallicity…
A review of the spectroscopic tools needed to characterize AGNs is presented. This review focusses on ultraviolet, optical and infrared emission-line diagnostics specifically designed to help differentiate AGNs from starburst-dominated…
Observations at long wavelengths, in the wide interval from a few to 1000 micron, are essential to study diffuse media in galaxies, including all kinds of atomic, ionic and molecular gases and dust grains. Hence they are particularly suited…
We present a direct determination of the stellar metallicity in the close pair galaxy NGC~4038 (D = 20 Mpc) based on the quantitative analysis of moderate resolution KMOS/VLT spectra of three super star clusters (SSCs). The method adopted…
A large fraction of massive stars evolve in interacting binary systems, which dramatically modifies the outcome of stellar evolution. We investigated the properties of blue supergiants in binary systems and whether they are suitable for…
In this paper we present a new method for selecting blue horizontal branch (BHB) candidates based on color-color photometry. We make use of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey z band as a surface gravity indicator and show its value for selecting…
We use synthetic photometry from Gaia DR3 BP and RP spectra for a large selected sample of stars in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) and Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC) to derive the magnitude of the Red Giant Branch (RGB) tip for these two…
Hypothetical influences of variability of light velocity due to the parameters of the source of radiation, for the results of spectral measurements of stars to search for exoplanets are considered. Accounting accelerations of stars relative…
The recent JWST tentative discovery of a population of super-early (redshift $z> 10$), relatively massive (stellar mass $M_* = 10^{8-9} M_{\odot}$) and evolved (metallicity $Z \approx 0.1 Z_{\odot}$) galaxies, which nevertheless show blue…
The Galactic bulge and bar are critical to our understanding of the Milky Way. However, due to the lack of reliable stellar distances, the structure and kinematics of the bulge/bar beyond the Galactic center have remained largely…
We use a contrastive self-supervised learning framework to estimate distances to galaxies from their photometric images. We incorporate data augmentations from computer vision as well as an application-specific augmentation accounting for…
There can arise ubiquitous ultra-light scalar fields in the Universe, such as the pseudo-Goldstone bosons from the spontaneous breaking of an approximate symmetry, which can make a partial contribution to the dark matter and affect the…
B[e] supergiants (B[e]SGs) are emission-line objects, presumably in a short-lived phase in the post-main sequence evolution of massive stars. Their intense infrared excess emission indicates large amounts of warm circumstellar dust, and the…
Massive star evolution is still poorly understood, and observational tests are required to discriminate between different implementations of physical phenomenon in stellar evolution codes. By confronting stellar evolution models with…
We compare distance measurements obtained from two distance indicators, Super- novae observations (standard candles) and Baryon acoustic oscillation data (standard rulers). The Union2 sample of supernovae with BAO data from SDSS, 6dFGS and…
The extragalactic background (EGB) of diffuse gamma rays can be determined by subtracting the Galactic contribution from the data. This requires a Galactic model (GM) and we include for the first time the contribution of dark matter…
Gravitational lensing is a powerful astrophysical and cosmological probe and is particularly valuable at submillimeter wavelengths for the study of the statistical and individual properties of dusty starforming galaxies. However the…