Related papers: The Red Giant Branch Bump
The color-magnitude diagrams of $\sim 1 \times 10^6$ stars obtained for 19 fields towards the Galactic bulge with the OGLE project reveal a well-defined population of bulge red clump stars. We found that the distributions of the…
When low- and intermediate-mass stars evolve off the main sequence, they expand and cool into the red giant stages of evolution, which include those associated with shell H burning (the red giant branch), core He burning (the red clump),…
We quantify the intrinsic width of the red giant branches of three massive globular clusters in M31 in a search for metallicity spreads within these objects. We present HST/ACS observations of three massive clusters in M31, G78, G213, and…
We present a precise determination of the apparent magnitude of the tip of the red giant branch (TRGB) in the I (0.8 micron), J (1.25 micron), and K_S (2.15 micron) bands from the luminosity function of a sample of data extracted from the…
The connection between mass loss on the red giant branch (RGB) and horizontal branch (HB) morphology in globular clusters (GCs) has long been acknowledged but the mechanisms governing mass loss remains poorly understood from a theoretical…
We present new large field-of-view ($\sim$1\deg$\times$1\deg) Ca-CN photometry of the prototypical metal-rich globular cluster 47 Tucanae (NGC 104). Our results are the following. (1) The populational number ratios of the red giant branch…
We have used deep high-resolution Hubble Space Telescope ACS observations to image the cluster NGC 1978 in the Large Magellanic Cloud. This high-quality photometric data set allowed us to confirm the high ellipticity (~0.30+-0.02) of this…
A few years ago we started an observational campaign aimed at the thorough study of the massive and remote globular cluster NGC2419. We have used the collected data, e.g., to test alternative theories of gravitation, to constrain the…
We present new high-quality near-infrared photometry of 10 Galactic Globular Clusters spanning a wide metallicity range (-2.12<[Fe/H]<-0.49): five clusters belong to the Halo (namely, NGC288, NGC362, NGC6752, M15 and M30) and five (namely,…
The surface [C/N] of red giants is correlated with birth mass, but not directly impacted by mass loss. Exploiting this, we compare asteroseismic masses of red giants with the same [C/N] and but different evolutionary states. We find bulk…
Among stars in Galactic globular clusters the carbon abundance tends to decrease with increasing luminosity on the upper red giant branch, particularly within the lowest metallicity clusters. While such a phenomena is not predicted by…
We present new photometry for the Galactic thick disk globular cluster Palomar 11 extending well past the main sequence turn-off in the V and I bands. This photometry shows noticeable red giant and subgiant branches. The difference in…
Mass loss on the red giant branch (RGB) influences stellar evolution, properties of stellar populations, and Galactic chemical enrichment, yet remains poorly constrained observationally. Current models provide limited insight into how…
We present near-IR Colour-Magnitude diagrams and physical parameters for a sample of 12 galactic globular clusters located toward the inner Bulge region. For each cluster we provide measurements of the reddening, distance, photometric…
We focus on two key diagnostics of stellar physics in red giant branch (RGB) stars: the first dredge-up (FDU) of nuclear processed material and the location of the red giant branch bump (RGBB). We compare asteroseismic and spectroscopic…
The tip of red giant branch (TRGB) stars have attracted intensive attention in recent years because their $I$-band absolute magnitudes, $M_\rm I$, are often used for distance calibration in the Hubble constant measurements because of its…
We suggest that the gap observed at 20,000 K in the horizontal branches of several Galactic globular clusters is caused by a small amount of extra mass loss which occurs when stars start to "peel off" the red giant branch (RGB), i.e., when…
In this paper we report on a curious feature in the V, (U-B) color-magnitude diagrams of globular clusters. In our database, we find that a considerable fraction of blue horizontal branch stars, hotter than the instability strip and cooler…
We obtained spectra of red giants in 15 Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC) clusters in the region of the CaII lines with FORS2 on the Very Large Telescope (VLT). We determined the mean metallicity and radial velocity with mean errors of 0.05 dex…
Based on multicolor photometry from the 2MASS and Tycho-2 catalogues, we have produced a sample of 38 368 branch red giants that has less than 1\% of admixtures and is complete within 500 pc of the Sun. The sample includes 30 671 K giants,…