Related papers: Pinning Down Gravitational Settling
Previous studies of the Fe abundances in the hot gas of galaxies and groups have reported conflicting results with most studies finding very sub-solar Fe abundances that disagree with standard theory. To investigate the possible role of Fe…
Neutral Fe lines in metal-poor stars yield conflicting abundances depending on whether and how deviations from local thermodynamic equilibrium (LTE) are considered. We have collected new high resolution and high signal-to-noise ultraviolet…
Recent years have seen a substantial improvement both in photometry of low luminosity stars in globular clusters and in modelling the stellar atmospheres of late-type dwarfs. We build on these observational and theoretical advances in…
We use near-infrared data obtained with the Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) on the Hubble Space Telescope to identify objects having the colors of brown dwarfs (BDs) in the field of the massive galactic cluster NGC 3603. These are identified…
We present an analysis of optical HST/STIS and HST/FOS spectroscopy of 6 blue stragglers found in the globular clusters M3, NGC6752 and NGC6397. These stars are a subsample of a set of ~50 blue stragglers and stars above the main sequence…
We present XMM-Newton/EPIC observations of six merging galaxy clusters and study the distributions of their temperature, iron (Fe) abundance and pseudo-entropy along the merging axis. For the first time, we focus simultaneously, and in a…
Globular Clusters (GCs) are natural laboratories where stellar and chemical evolution can be studied in detail. In addition, their chemical patterns and kinematics can tell us wich Galactic structure (Disk, Bulge, Halo or extragalactic) the…
The Li-rich turn-off star in the globular cluster NGC 6397 could represent the smoking gun for some very rare episode of Li enrichment in globular clusters. We aim to understand the nature of the Li enrichment by performing a spectroscopic…
Silicon abundances were determined by applying the spectrum-fitting technic to the Si II doublet lines at 6347 and 6371A for a sample of 120 main-sequence stars in the T_eff range of ~7000-14000K (comprising not only normal stars but also…
We report the serendipitous discovery of a faint (M_UV > -12.2), low-metallicity (Z ~ 0.02 Zsun), ionizing source (dubbed T2c) with a spectroscopic redshift of z=6.146. T2c is part of a larger structure amplified by the Hubble Frontier…
High-resolution spectroscopic studies of solar-type stars have revealed higher iron abundances derived from singly ionized species compared to neutral, violating the ionization equilibrium under the assumption of local thermodynamic…
At the "New Horizons in Globular Cluster Astronomy" conference (Padova, June 2002), two members of the VLT globular cluster team presented different views on the importance of heavy-element sedimentation in Population II stars: "The lack of…
We present a series of systematic abundance measurements for a group of hot DA white dwarfs in the temperature range 20,000-75,000K, based on far-UV spectroscopy with STIS on HST, IUE and FUSE. Using our latest heavy element blanketed…
We establish an empirical effective temperature calibration of main sequence, luminosity class V to III B-type stars for the Delta a photometric system which was originally developed to detect magnetic chemically peculiar objects of the…
We present an analysis of high-resolution spectra of six core-helium-burning "clump" stars in the open cluster NGC 6134. Atmospheric parameters T_eff, log_g, v_t, and [Fe/H] were determined in our previous study by Carretta et al. (2004).…
We present the results of a spatially-resolved spectroscopic analysis of the galaxy cluster Abell 496 with the S3 chip on-board the Chandra satellite. We confirm the presence of a central positive temperature gradient consistent with a…
Within the context of a large project aimed at studying early F-, A- and late B-type stars we present the abundance analysis of the photospheres of 21 members of the open cluster NGC 5460, an intermediate age cluster (logt ~ 8.2) previously…
The visually brightest stars in globular clusters (GCs) are the ones evolving off the asymptotic giant branch (AGB) and passing through spectral types F and A--the "yellow" post-AGB (yPAGB) stars. yPAGB stars are potentially excellent…
We have analyzed archival spectra of the hot UV-bright star ZNG 1 in the globular cluster M5 (NGC 5904) obtained with the Far Ultraviolet Spectroscopic Explorer (FUSE) and the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph (STIS). From these data, we…
We present Hubble Space Telescope Wide Field Camera 3 observations of the core of the Phoenix Cluster SPT-CLJ2344-4243 in five broadband filters spanning rest-frame 1000--5500A. These observations reveal complex, filamentary blue emission,…