Related papers: Extragalactic Stellar Astronomy with Blue Supergia…
The extragalactic background light (EBL) contains important information about stellar and galaxy evolution. It leaves imprint on the very high energy $\gamma$-ray spectra from sources at cosmological distances due to the process of pair…
The discovery of distant sources of very high energy (VHE) gamma-rays with hard energy spectra enabled to derive strong upper limits on the density of the extragalactic background light (EBL). These limits are close to the lower limits…
The method of spectral disentangling has now created the opportunity for studying the chemical composition in previously inaccessible components of binary and multiple stars. This in turn makes it possible to trace their chemical evolution,…
The evolution of massive stars is affected by a variety of physical processes including convection, rotation, mass loss and binary interaction. Because these processes modify the internal chemical abundance profiles in multiple ways…
Accurate atomic data have become available in the recent past due to the demands of astrophysics and fusion research. We report on the impact of such data on non-LTE line-formation calculations for CNO in early-type stars. Considerable…
With the equivalent area of a 16m telescope, ESPRESSO in 4UT mode allows to inaugurate high resolution spectroscopy for solar-type stars belonging to extragalactic globular clusters. We determine the chemical composition of an extragalactic…
Quantitative spectroscopy of luminous BA-type supergiants offers a high potential for modern astrophysics. The degree to which we can rely on quantitative studies of this class of stars as a whole depends on the quality of the analyses for…
Data from (non-) attenuation of gamma rays from active galactic nuclei (AGN) and gamma ray bursts (GRBs) give upper limits on the extragalactic background light (EBL) from the UV to the mid-IR that are only a little above the lower limits…
LTE abundances of light elements in extremely metal-poor (EMP) stars have been previously derived from high quality spectra. New derivations, free from the NLTE effects, will better constrain the models of the Galactic chemical evolution…
Stellar emission and absorption lines are routinely observed in galaxies at redshifts up to 5 with spectrographs on 8-10m class telescopes. While the overall spectra are well understood and have been successfully modeled using empirical and…
This is a brief overview of the elemental abundance patterns that have been observed in the different Galactic stellar populations. Main focus is on studies that are based on high-resolution spectra of dwarf and subgiant stars, and in some…
I review selected current observations of distant galaxies and our interpretation of the fragile (and occasionally contradictory) data. Galaxies at the ``contemporary limit'' of technology and redshift (z~6) are difficult to locate in the…
The existence of blue straggler stars (BSS), which appear younger, hotter, and more massive than their siblings, is at odds with a simple picture of stellar evolution, as such stars should have exhausted their nuclear fuel and evolved long…
Dwarf irregular galaxies appear to have undergone very slow chemical evolution since they have low nebular abundances, but have had ongoing star formation over the past 15 Gyr. They are too distant for red giant abundance analyses to…
Recent high-resolution observations of the central region of Galactic globular clusters have shown the presence of a large variety of exotic stellar objects whose formation and evolution may be strongly affected by dynamical interactions.…
Priorities in exo-planet research are rapidly moving from finding planets to characterizing their physical properties. Of key importance is their chemical composition, which feeds back into our understanding of planet formation. For the…
(Abridged) The abundances of alpha-elements are a powerful diagnostic of the star formation history and chemical evolution of a galaxy. Sulphur, being moderately volatile, can be reliably measured in the interstellar medium (ISM) of damped…
In this paper, we investigate the evolutionary status of B[e]~stars from the point of view of stellar evolution theory. We try to answer to the question of how massive hot supergiants --- i.e. evolved stars --- can be capable of producing a…
The blue supergiant (BSG) problem, namely, the overabundance of BSGs inconsistent with classical stellar evolution theory, remains an open question in stellar astrophysics. Several theoretical explanations have been proposed, which may be…
Open clusters serve as important tools for accurately studying the chemical evolution of the Milky Way. By combining precise chemical data from high-resolution spectra with information on their distances and ages, we can effectively uncover…