Related papers: The AGB superwind speed at low metallicity

A moderately deep survey of stellar maser sources toward the Galactic center has been made in the SiO J=1-0 v=1 and v=2 transitions (~ 43 GHz) with the Nobeyama 45-m telescope of a beam size of about 40". At the Galactic center (Sgr A*), 7…

We calculated theoretical evolutionary sequences of asymptotic giant branch (AGB) stars, including formation and evolution of dust grains in their circumstellar envelope. By considering stellar populations of the Large Magellanic Cloud…

Context. Extremely reddened AGB stars lose mass at high rates of >10^-5 Msun/yr. This is the very last stage of AGB evolution, in which stars in the mass range 2.0--4.0 Msun (for solar metallicity) should have been converted to C stars…

We report 250 GHz (1.2mm) observations of redshift > 3.8 quasars from the Palomar Sky Survey (PSS) sample, using the Max-Planck Millimetre Bolometer (MAMBO) array at the IRAM 30-metre telescope. Eighteen sources were detected and upper…

OH megamasers (OHMs) are extragalactic masers found primarily in gas-rich galaxy major mergers. To date, only $\sim$120 OHMs have been cataloged since their discovery in 1982, and efforts to identify distinct characteristics of OHM host…

Mass loss in oxygen-rich asymptotic giant branch (AGB) stars remains poorly understood, as the dust detected around them appears too transparent to drive winds through absorption alone. The current paradigm invokes outflows driven by photon…

We present the results of unbiased 22 GHz H2O water and 44 GHz class I CH3OH methanol maser surveys in the central 7x10 arcmin area of NGC 1333 and two additional mapping observations of a 22 GHz water maser in a ~3x3arcmin area of the…

We trace the full evolution of low- and intermediate-mass stars ($1 M_{\odot} \leq M \leq 8M_{\odot}$) during the Asymptotic Giant Branch (AGB) phase in the {\it Spitzer} two-color and color-magnitude diagrams. We follow the formation and…

Intense mass loss through cool, low-velocity winds is a defining characteristic of low-to-intermediate mass stars during the asymptotic giant branch (AGB) evolutionary stage. Such winds return up ~80% of the initial stellar mass to the…

Context: AGB stars lose a large percentage of their mass in a dust-driven wind. This creates a circumstellar envelope, which can be studied through thermal dust emission and molecular emission lines. In the case of high mass-loss rates,…

We report on a large 44 GHz ($7_0-6_1$ A$^+$) methanol (CH$_3$OH) maser survey of the Galactic Center (GC). The Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array was used to search for CH$_3$OH maser emission covering a large fraction of the region around…

We present HIRES/Keck profiles of four extremely strong (W_r > 1.8 A) Mg II absorbers at 1 < z < 2. The profiles display a common kinematic structure, having a sharp drop in optical depth near the center of the profile and strong,…

We report four new 22 GHz water masers found in a Green Bank Telescope search toward 37 nearby objects. Our goal was to find new maser galaxies, AGN disk-masers, and objects where both hydroxyl and water maser species coexist. We observed…

We present observations of the famous OH/IR star OH26.5+0.6 obtained using the Mid-Infrared Interferometric Instrument MIDI at the European Southern Observatory (ESO) Very Large Telescope Interferometer VLTI. The emission of the dusty…

In this work we present near-IR spectra (HK-band) of a sample of 107 sources with mid-IR excesses at 7 and 15 $\rm \mu$m detected during the ISOGAL survey. Making use of the DENIS interstellar extinction map from Schultheis et al. (1999) we…

We surveyed 20 AGB stars of different chemical types using the APEX telescope, and combined this with an IRAM 30 m and APEX survey of CS and SiS emission towards over 30 S-type stars. For those stars with detections, we performed radiative…

Using ALMA, we observed the stellar wind of two oxygen-rich Asymptotic Giant Branch (AGB) stars, IK Tau and R Dor, between 335 and 362 GHz. One aim was to detect metal oxides and metal hydroxides (AlO, AlOH, FeO, MgO, MgOH), some of which…

Mass loss is a fundamental, observationally well-established feature of AGB stars but many aspects of this process still remain to be understood. To date, self-consistent dynamical models of dust-driven winds reproducing the observed…

Using a revised version of the catalog of AGB stars by Suh & Kwon (2009), we present various infrared two-colour diagrams (2CDs) for 3003 O-rich, 1168 C-rich, 362 S-type and 35 silicate carbon stars in our Galaxy. For each object in the new…

The mass-loss process from evolved stars is a key ingredient for our understanding of many fields of astrophysics, including stellar evolution and the chemical enrichment of the interstellar medium via stellar yields. One the main unsolved…