Related papers: Stellar Abundances: Recent and Foreseeable Trends
The next decade of survey astronomy has the potential to transform our knowledge of variable stars. Stellar variability underpins our knowledge of the cosmological distance ladder, and provides direct tests of stellar formation and…
Environmental research aimed at monitoring and predicting O2 depletion is still lacking or in need of improvement, in spite of many attempts to find a relation between atmospheric gas content and climate variability. The aim of the present…
Stars are fossils that retain the history of their host galaxies. Carbon and heavier elements are created inside stars and are ejected when they die. From the spatial distribution of elements in galaxies, it is therefore possible to…
I review the statistical techniques needed to extract information about physical parameters of galaxies from their observed spectra. This is important given the sheer size of the next generation of large galaxy redshift surveys. Going to…
Astrophysics = the star physics was beginning its development without a supporting of measurement data, which could not be obtained then. Still astrophysics exists without this support, although now astronomers collected a lot of valuable…
Astrophysics demands higher precision in measurements across photometry, spectroscopy, and astrometry. Several science cases necessitate not only precision but also a high level of accuracy. We highlight the challenges involved,…
Open and globular star clusters have served as benchmarks for the study of stellar evolution due to their supposed nature as simple stellar populations of the same age and metallicity. After a brief review of some of the pioneering work…
In stellar astrophysics, the study of the atmospheres of early-type stars plays a very special role. The atmospheres of these stars display a variety of different phenomena, such as the presence of large magnetic fields, strong surface…
Spectroscopic observations of distant cosmological sources continue to exhibit a surprising result; that the chemical abundance of the universe seems to be approximately solar for the observed sources at redshifts of 5, 6, and even 7, even…
Many aspects of the evolution of stars, and in particular the evolution of binary stars, remain beyond our ability to model them in detail. Instead, we rely on observations to guide our often phenomenological models and pin down uncertain…
Accurate model stellar fluxes are key for the analysis of observations of individual stars or stellar populations. Model spectra differ from real stellar spectra due to limitations of the input physical data and adopted simplifications, but…
Despite centuries of close association, statistics and astronomy are surprisingly distant today. Most observational astronomical research relies on an inadequate toolbox of methodological tools. Yet the needs are substantial: astronomy…
Quantitative spectroscopy is a powerful technique from which we can extract information about the physical properties and surface chemical composition of stars. In this chapter, I guide the reader through the main ideas required to get…
The measurement of chemical abundances in planetary nebulae in nearby galaxies is now relatively straightforward. The challenge is to use these chemical abundances to infer the chemical evolution of their host galaxies. At this point, our…
The past decade has led to significant improvements in our understanding of the physical structure of the molecular cores of cold dark clouds. Observational efforts, in combination with improved knowledge of cloud structure, now provide…
The present generation of large telescopes facilitates spectroscopy of blue supergiants in galaxies out to distances beyond the Local Group. Recent developments in NLTE spectrum synthesis techniques allow for an accurate determination of…
Large-scale surveys will provide spectroscopy for $\sim$50 million resolved stars in the Milky Way and Local Group. However, these data will have a high degree of heterogeneity and most will be low-resolution ($R<10000$), posing challenges…
Spectra of late-type stars are usually analyzed with static model atmospheres in local thermodynamic equilibrium (LTE) and a homogeneous plane-parallel or spherically symmetric geometry. The energy balance requires particular attention, as…
The polarization of light is a critically under-utilized, rich source of information in astronomy. For stars in particular, surface magnetism polarization that can be detected and measured with spectro-polarimetry. Many questions about…
Stellar population synthesis can be approached as an inverse problem. The physical information is extracted from the observations through an inverse model. The process requires the transformation of the observational errors into model…