Related papers: Post-AGB Stars as Standard Extragalactic Candles

I will be reviewing three methods to identify late-type giants in extragalactic systems, based on the main characteristics of AGB stars (they are infrared bright, variable, and have spectral peculiarities).

The detected variety in chemistry and circumstellar shell morphology of the limited sample of Galactic post-AGB stars is so large that there is no consensus yet on how the different objects are linked by evolutionary channels. The…

Post-AGB stars evolve on a very fast track and hence not many are known. Their spectral properties make them, in principle, ideal objects to test our theories on the late phases of stellar evolution. This has, however, proven much more…

We have extended the study of the young star clusters observed in the merger remnant galaxy NGC 7252 by obtaining K band photometry for these clusters. Our K band data significantly complement the optical photometry and spectroscopy in the…

The J-region Asymptotic Giant Branch (JAGB) method is a standard candle based on the intrinsic luminosities of carbon stars in the near infrared. We directly constrain the impact of metallicity, age, and reddening on the JAGB method. We…

We investigate the population of cool, evolved stars in the Local Group dwarf elliptical galaxy M32, using Infrared Array Camera observations from the Spitzer Space Telescope. We construct deep mid-infrared colour-magnitude diagrams for the…

The diffuse extended outer regions of galaxies are hard to study because they are faint, with typical surface brightness of 1% of the dark night sky. We can tackle this problem by using resolved star tracers which remain visible at large…

We have carried out a search for optically visible post-AGB candidates in the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC). We used mid-IR observations from the Spitzer Space Telescope to select optically visible candidates with a mid-IR excess. We…

We present a complete study of the morphology of post-Asymptotic Giant Branch (AGB) stars. Post-AGB is a very short evolutionary phase between the end of the AGB and the beginning of the Planetary Nebula (PN) stage (between 100 and 10,000…

We present new optical broad-band (UBVRI) aperture polarimetric observations of 53 post-asymptotic giant branch (AGB) stars selected to exhibit a large near-infrared excess. 24 out of the 53 stars (45% of our sample) are presented for the…

We explore the stellar population of M31 in a Spitzer Space Telescope survey utilizing IRAC and MIPS observations. Red supergiants are the brightest objects seen in the infrared; they are a prominent evolutionary phase. Due to their…

Context. Extremely reddened AGB stars lose mass at high rates of >10^-5 Msun/yr. This is the very last stage of AGB evolution, in which stars in the mass range 2.0--4.0 Msun (for solar metallicity) should have been converted to C stars…

A sample of 27 sources, catalogued as pre-main sequence stars by the Pico dos Dias Survey (PDS), is analyzed to investigate a possible contamination by post-AGB stars. The far-infrared excess, due to dust present in the circumstellar…

Relying on U,B imagery at the Italian Telescopio Nazionale Galileo (TNG), we report here the discovery of a sample of 13 new UV-bright post-HB candidate stars in the field of the galactic open cluster NGC 6791. Owing to its super-solar…

Hot (OB) post-AGB stars are immediate progenitors of planetary nebulae (PNe). Very few hot post-AGB stars are known. Detecting new hot post-AGB candidates and follow-up multiwavelength studies will enable us to further understand the…

We present simulated J- and K-band observations of stars in the Virgo and Coma clusters of galaxies using the proposed Next Generation Space Telescope with a Near-Infrared Camera, and discuss some of the science results that might be…

Context. When low and intermediate-mass stars leave the Asymptotic Giant Branch (AGB) phase, and before they reach the Planetary Nebulae stage, they enter a very brief and rather puzzling stellar evolutionary stage named post-AGB. Aims. To…

We present stellar photometry in the UBV passbands for the globular cluster M5 = NGC5904. The observations, short-exposured photographic plates and CCD frames, were obtained in the RC-focus of the 2m telescope of the Natl. Astron. Obs.…

Galactic globular clusters (GCs) are known to host multiple stellar populations: a first generation with a chemical pattern typical of halo field stars and a second generation (SG) enriched in Na and Al and depleted in O and Mg. Both…

A review is presented of the most relevant results obtained in the last few years on this rare class of astronomical sources. Multi-wavelength analysis of an increasing number of post-AGB stars reveal that they constitute a more…