Related papers: Heavy element diffusion and globular cluster ages
The processes that disperse the products of massive stars from their birth sites play a fundamental role in determining the observed abundances. I discuss parameterizations for element dispersal and their roles in chemical evolution, with…
I shall review what has been learnt during 20 years of lithium observations in stars belonging to metal-poor globular clusters. The focus will be on little evolved main-sequence, turnoff-point (TOP) and subgiant-branch (SGB) stars expected…
Element diffusion is a key physical process that substantially impacts the superficial abundances, internal structure, pulsation properties, and evolution of white dwarfs. We study the effect of Coulomb separation of ions in the cooling…
Morphological aspects of the $V, \bv$ diagram of metal-rich globular clusters are analyzed, on the basis of stellar evolution models for horizontal-branch (HB) and red giant branch stars. These have been incorporated into detailed synthetic…
Pulsations in subdwarf B stars are attributed to radiative levitation of iron-group elements in the stellar envelope. Until now, only iron diffusion is accounted for in stellar models used for sdB seismology. However, nickel has also been…
We study the diffusion of helium and other heavy elements in the solar interior by solving exactly the set of flow equations developed by Burgers for a multi-component fluid, including the residual heat-flow terms. No approximation is made…
We investigate the predicted Color-Magnitude distribution of metal-rich Horizontal Branch (HB) stars, discussing selected theoretical models computed under various assumptions about the star metallicity and the efficiency of super-adiabatic…
The observed abundance variations in globular cluster red giants indicate that these stars may be mixing helium from the hydrogen shell outward into the envelope, presumably as a result of internal rotation. We have investigated the…
Previous evolutionary computations concerning stars with masses in the range of the ``Red Giants Transition Phase'' are extended to lower metallicities. Clusters isochrones for two values of the metallicity Z (Z=10E-4, 4E-4) and for ages…
We have developed an homogeneous evolutionary scenario for H- and He-burning low-mass stars by computing updated stellar models for a wide metallicity and age range (0.0002$\le Z \le$0.004 and 9$\le t(Gyr) \le$15, respectively) suitable to…
Globular clusters are ideal laboratories to study the evolution of low-mass stars. In this work we concentrate on three types of hot stars observed in globular clusters: horizontal branch stars, UV bright stars, and white dwarfs. After…
The chemical evolution of the Galactic bulge is treated here in the context of an inside-out model for the Galaxy formation. We assume that this central region evolved even faster than the Galactic halo and test the effect of changing the…
A significant fraction of stars in globular clusters (about 70%-85%) exhibit peculiar chemical patterns with strong abundance variations in light elements along with constant abundances in heavy elements. These abundance anomalies can be…
Grids of zero-age horizontal branch (ZAHB) models are presented, along with a suitable interpolation code, for -2.5 <= [Fe/H] <= -0.5, in steps of 0.2 dex, assuming Y = 0.25 and 0.29, [O/Fe] = +0.4 and +0.6, and [m/Fe] = 0.4 for all of the…
The present work is designed to explore the evolution of helium-core white dwarf (HeWD) stars for the case of metallicities much lower than the solar one (Z=0.001 and Z=0.0002). Evolution is followed in a self-consistent way with the…
There is compelling observational evidence that globular clusters (GCs) are quite complex objects. A growing body of photometric results indicate that the evolutionary sequences are not simply isochrones in the observational plane -as…
Blue horizontal branch and UV bright stars in several globular clusters are analysed spectroscopically and the results are compared with predictions of stellar evolutionary theory. We find that the distribution of temperatures and surface…
We explore the effects of element diffusion due to gravitational settling and thermal and chemical diffusion on the pulsational properties of DA white dwarfs. To this end, we employ an updated evolutionary code coupled with a pulsational,…
Using our updated stellar evolutionary code, we quantitatively evaluate the effects of the uncertainties in the main physical inputs on the evolutionary characteristics of low mass stars from the main sequence to the zero age horizontal…
We investigate the influence of the external tidal field of a dark matter halo on the dynamical evolution of star clusters using direct N-body simulations, where we assume that the halo is described by a Navarro, Frenk & White mass profile…