Related papers: Understanding the Elusive Dwarf Carbon Star

We report the discovery of a new class of hydrogen-deficient stars: white dwarfs with an atmosphere primarily composed of carbon, with little or no trace of hydrogen or helium. Our analysis shows that the atmospheric parameters found for…

Globular clusters contain many stars with surface abundance patterns indicating contributions from hydrogen burning products, as seen in the anti-correlated elemental abundances of e.g. sodium and oxygen, and magnesium and aluminium.…

Stellar evolution theory is most uncertain for massive stars. For reliable predictions of the evolution of massive stars and their final fate, solid constraints on the physical parameters, and their changes along the evolution and in…

The S-type stars are believed to have a C/O-ratio close to unity (within a few percent). They are considered to represent an intermediate evolutionary stage as AGB stars evolve from oxygen-rich M-type stars into carbon stars. As possible…

A long standing and unverified prediction of binary star evolution theory is the existence of a population of white dwarfs accreting from sub-stellar donor stars. Such systems ought to be common, but the difficulty of finding them, combined…

Decades after their discovery, only four hydrogen-deficient carbon (HdC) stars were known to have no circumstellar dust shell. This is in complete contrast to the $\sim$130 known Galactic HdC stars that are notorious for being heavy dust…

White dwarfs represent the endpoint of stellar evolution for stars with initial masses between approximately 0.07 msun and 8-10 msun, where msun is the mass of the Sun (more massive stars end their life as either black holes or neutron…

At least one, but more likely two or more, eccentric neutron-star, carbon-oxygen white-dwarf binaries with an unrecycled pulsar have been observed. According to the standard scenario for evolving neutron stars which are recycled in common…

The bulge carbon stars have been a mystery since their discovery, because they are about 2.5mag too faint to be regarded as genuine AGB stars, if located inside the metal-rich bulge (m-M=14.5mag). Part of the mystery can be solved if these…

Carbon-deficient red giants (CDGs) are a peculiar class of stars that have eluded explanation for decades. We aim to better characterise CDGs by using asteroseismology (Kepler, TESS) combined with spectroscopy (APOGEE, LAMOST), and…

The compact elliptical galaxy M32 offers a unique testing ground for theories of stellar evolution. Because of its proximity, solar-blind UV observations can resolve the hot evolved stars in its center. Some of these late evolutionary…

Using the standard infall model of Galactic chemical evolution, we explore the origin of carbon and calculate the abundance evolution of CNO elements for 8 different models of stellar nucleosynthesis yields. The results show that, in the…

We have identified a new class of Asymptotic Giant Branch (AGB) stars in the Small and Large Magellanic Clouds (SMC/LMC) using optical to infrared photometry, light curves, and optical spectroscopy. The strong dust production and…

The photometric estimate of the metallicity and the age of the Azzopardi et al. (1991, A&AS 88, 265) carbon stars (Ng 1997, A&A 328, 211) is revised to respectively Z~0.004 and ~0.1 Gyr. Under the hypothesis that the carbon stars are…

Subdwarf B (sdB) stars are thought to be helium burning stars with low mass hydrogen envelopes. Several evolutionary paths have been proposed to explain the formation of these systems. One of these scenarios is the evolution of the sdB…

Planets and other low-mass binary companions to stars face a variety of potential fates as their host stars move off the main sequence and grow to subgiants and giants. Stellar mass loss tends to make orbits expand, and tidal torques tend…

White dwarf stars are the most common endpoint of stellar evolution. Therefore, these old, numerous and compact objects provide valuable information on the late stages of stellar evolution, the physics of dense plasma and the structure and…

Carbon rich stars of Population II, such as CH giants, can provide direct information on the role of low to intermediate mass stars of the Halo in early Galactic evolution. Moreover, accurate knowledge of the CH stellar population is a…

Under the right conditions brown dwarfs that gain enough mass late in their lives to cross the hydrogen burning limit will not turn into low-mass stars, but rather remain essentially brown dwarf-like. While these objects, called either…

The formation of massive stars is one of the major unsolved problems in stellar astrophysics. However, only few if any of these are found as single stars, on average massive stars have more than one companion. Many of them are born in dense…