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When a star exhausts its nuclear fuel, it either explodes as a supernova or more quiescently becomes a white dwarf, an object about half the mass of our Sun with a radius of about that of the Earth. About one fifth of white dwarfs exhibit…
We study the resolved stellar populations of dwarf galaxies in the nearby Centaurus A/M83 group of galaxies. Our goal is to characterize their evolutionary history and to investigate eventual similarities or differences with the dwarf…
We carry out a numerical study of the effects of supernova-driven shocks on galaxy formation at z=9. These "cosmic explosions" can have a significant impact on galaxies forming nearby. We study such interactions in two key cases. In the…
We present theoretical delay times and rates of thermonuclear explosions that are thought to produce Type Ia supernovae, including the double-detonation sub-Chandrasekhar mass model, using the population synthesis binary evolution code…
Type Ia supernovae (SN Ia) are the most important standard candles for measuring the expansion history of the universe. The thermonuclear explosion of a white dwarf can explain their observed properties, but neither the progenitor systems…
The explosive death of a star as a supernova is one of the most dramatic events in the Universe. Supernovae have an outsized impact on many areas of astrophysics: they are major contributors to the chemical enrichment of the cosmos and…
A leading model for Type Ia supernovae involves the double-detonation of a sub-Chandrasekhar mass white dwarf. Double-detonations arise when a surface helium shell detonation generates shockwaves that trigger a core detonation; this…
The chemical abundances of a stellar population encode information about nucleosynthesis and its astrophysical sites, but this information is confounded by the specific star formation history of the host galaxy. As a result, placing…
Supernova rates (hypernova, type II, type Ib/c and type Ia) in a particular galaxy depend on the metallicity (i.e. on the galaxy age), on the physics of star formation and on the binary population. In order to study the time evolution of…
The time delay between the formation of the progenitor systems of Type Ia supernovae (SNe Ia) and their detonation is a vital discriminant between the various progenitor scenarios that have been proposed for them. We use SDSS optical and…
Cold dark matter models for galaxy formation predict that low-mass systems will be the first sites of star formation. As these objects have shallow gravitational potential wells, the subsequent growth of their stellar populations may be…
Subdwarf A-type stars (sdAs) are objects that have hydrogen-rich spectra with surface gravity similar to that of hot subdwarf stars but effective temperature below the zero-age horizontal branch (ZAHB). They are considered to be metal-poor…
I find that Type Ia supernovae (SNe Ia) with bimodal nebular emission profiles occur almost exclusively in massive ($M_\star \gtrsim 10^{11}~M_\odot$) galaxies with low star-formation rates (SFR~$\lesssim 0.5~M_\odot$/yr). The bimodal…
Our aim is to study the evolution of tidal dwarf galaxies. The first step is to understand whether a model galaxy without Dark Matter can sustain the feedback of the ongoing star formation. We present tests of the evolution of models in…
The parameter space for mass loss in Type Ia supernova progenitors is large, with different progenitor scenarios favoring different mass loss regimes. Here we focus on the impact that uniform and isotropic outflows have on the circumstellar…
Several recently discovered peculiar type Ia supernovae seem to demand an altogether new formation theory that might help explain the puzzling dissimilarities between them and the standard type Ia supernovae. The most striking aspect of the…
In this paper, the first in a series on galaxy formation before reionization, we focus on understanding what determines the size and morphology of stellar objects in the first low mass galaxies, using parsec- scale cosmological simulations…
Close binaries consisting of a main sequence star and a white dwarf are considered as candidates for Type~Ia supernova progenitors. We present selfconsistent calculations of the time dependence of the structure of the main sequence star,…
The single-degenerate model is currently a favourable progenitor model for Type Ia supernovae (SNe Ia). Recent investigations on the WD + He star channel of the single-degenerate model imply that this channel is noteworthy for producing SNe…
We use a series of N-body/smoothed particle hydrodynamics simulations and analytic arguments to show that the presence of an effective temperature floor in the interstellar medium at T_F ~ 10^4 K naturally explains the tendency for low-mass…