Related papers: Quantitative Spectroscopy of Supergiants
Gamma rays reveal extreme, nonthermal conditions in the Universe. The Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope has been exploring the gamma-ray sky for more than four years, enabling a search for powerful transients like gamma-ray bursts, solar…
Despite major progress in our understanding of massive stars, concerning discrepancies still remain between observations and theory. Most notable are the numerous stars observed beyond the theoretical main sequence, an evolutionary phase…
Surveys at mm wavelengths emphasize rare classes of extragalactic radio sources characterized by spectra keeping flat or inverted up to high frequencies (such as blazars, GPS sources, advection dominated sources, or even gamma-ray burst…
The role of episodic mass loss in massive star evolution is one of the most important open questions of current stellar evolution theory. Episodic mass loss produces dust and therefore causes evolved massive stars to be very luminous in the…
The important role of metallicity on massive star evolution and the combination of multi-object spectrographs and 10m class telescopes, have lead to numerous systematic studies of massive stars in Local Group galaxies. While color based…
Many stars -- if they could be imaged with enough angular resolution -- would exhibit features expected from theory but not possible to extract from spectra. We may group these by increasing complexity as follows. First, smooth variations…
Here we describe some of our latest results from measuring detailed abundances in Local Group dwarf galaxies with VLT. Combining spectroscopic abundances with Colour-Magnitude diagrams allows the effective measurement of detailed chemical…
Blue straggler stars (BSSs) are brighter and bluer than the main-sequence (MS) turnoff and more massive than MS stars.Two scenarios for their formation have been proposed: collision-induced stellar mergers (COL-BSSs),or mass-transfer in…
There is evidence that some red supergiants (RSGs) experience short lived phases of extreme mass loss, producing copious amounts of dust. These episodic outburst phases help to strip the hydrogen envelope of evolved massive stars,…
Establishing the spatial extents and the nature of the outer stellar populations of dwarf galaxies are necessary ingredients for the determination of their total masses, current dynamical states and past evolution. We here describe our…
The spectra of two early B-type supergiant stars in the Sculptor spiral galaxy NGC 300 are analysed by means of non-LTE line blanketed unified model atmospheres, aimed at determining their chemical composition and the fundamental stellar…
We use the KPNO International Spectroscopic Survey (KISS) for emission-line galaxies to identify and describe a sample of local analogues to the luminous compact blue galaxies (LCBGs) that are observed to be abundant at intermediate and…
The evolutionary state of blue supergiants is still unknown. Stellar wind mass loss is one of the dominant processes determining the evolution of massive stars, and it may provide clues on the evolutionary properties of blue supergiants. As…
We present ultraviolet spectra from the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph (STIS) of 12 early B-type stars in the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC), comprising 9 supergiants and 3 giants. A morphological comparison with Galactic analogues is…
Fast yellow pulsating supergiants (FYPS) are a recently-discovered class of evolved massive pulsator. As candidate post-red supergiant objects, and one of the few classes of pulsating evolved massive stars, these objects have incredible…
The search for chemically unevolved galaxies remains prevalent in the nearby Universe, mostly because these systems provide excellent proxies for exploring in detail the physics of high-z systems. The most promising candidates are extremely…
The unrivalled, extreme luminosities of gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) make them the favored beacons for sampling the high redshift Universe. To employ GRBs to study the cosmic terrain -- e.g., star and galaxy formation history -- GRB luminosities…
The most powerful persistent accelerators in the Universe are jetted active galaxies. Blazars, galaxies whose jets are directed towards Earth, dominate the extragalactic gamma-ray sky. Still, most of the highest-energy particle accelerators…
We discuss V and R band photometry for 67% of the Sullivan et al. 2000 SA57 ultraviolet-selected galaxy sample. In a sample of 176 UV-selected galaxies, Sullivan et al. 2000 find that 24% have (UV-B) colors too blue for consistency with…
We present photometry and a preliminary interpretation of a UBVR survey of the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds. We determine improved values for the relative number of blue and red supergiants. We also compare the relative number of Red…