Related papers: Nuclear burning rates and population II stellar mo…
We present a review of the present state of knowledge regarding the relative ages of Galactic globular clusters. First, we discuss the relevant galaxy formation models and describe the detailed predictions they make with respect to the…
The creation of carbon and oxygen in our universe is one of the forefront questions in nuclear astrophysics. The determination of the abundance of these elements is key to both our understanding of the formation of life on earth and to the…
Globular clusters offer ideal laboratories to test the predictions of stellar evolution. When doing so with spectroscopic analyses during the 1990s, however, the parameters we derived for hot horizontal branch stars deviated systematically…
The NO cycle takes place in the deepest layer of a H-burning core or shell, when the temperature exceeds T {\simeq} 30 {\cdot} 106 K. The O depletion observed in some globular cluster giant stars, always associated with a Na enhancement,…
We measured the thermonuclear burning efficiency as a function of accretion rate for the Type I X-ray bursts of five low-mass X-ray binary systems. We chose sources with measured neutron star spins and a substantial population of bursts…
We present a statistical approach for estimating the age of Globular Clusters by measurement of the likelihood between the observed cluster sequences in the Colour--Magnitude Diagram and the synthetic cluster sequences computed from stellar…
We present high-resolution optical and near-infrared HST observations of two adjacent regions in the fossil starburst region in M82, B1 and B2. Age estimates date the cluster population in the fossil starburst between ~2 x 10^8 and ~10 x…
Pre-main sequence evolutionary theory is not well-calibrated to observations. With care, the observed quantities can be converted into effective temperature and luminosity (i.e. the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram) which the theoretical…
We investigate the evolution of binary fractions in star clusters using N-body models of up to 100000 stars. Primordial binary frequencies in these models range from 5% to 50%. Simulations are performed with the NBODY4 code and include a…
Evolution of the coalescence rate of double neutron stars (NS) and neutron star -- black hole (BH) binaries are computed for model galaxies with different star formation rates. Assuming gamma-ray bursts (GRB) to originate from NS+NS or…
I review aspects of the evolution of horizontal branch (HB) stars. I start by discussing current topics in the study of HB stellar evolution, including a brief review of the main determinants of the structure of low-mass core helium burning…
Stars with initial masses 7 Msun . MZAMS . 9 Msun reach temperatures high enough to ignite C under degenerate conditions after the end of He-core burning (Garcia-Berro & Iben 1994). These isolated stars are expected to evolve into the…
X-ray burst model predictions of light curves and final composition of the nuclear ashes are affected by uncertain nuclear masses. However, not all of these masses are determined experimentally with sufficient accuracy. Here we identify…
Most of proposed models of cosmological gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) are associated to gravitational collapses of massive stars, and hence evolution of the GRB rate, which is crucially important in GRB intensity distribution analysis, is…
In studying encounters between binaries and single stars, one is interested in three classes of events: exchanges of stars, hardening of the original binary by a third star, and the production of merged objects. We present a means for…
We present analysis of 63 nearby ($<$ 44 Mpc) early-type galaxies hosting nuclear star clusters using the recently discovered parameter Central Intensity Ratio (CIR$_I$) determined from near-infra-red (3.6 $\mu$m) observations with the…
Nearly all globular clusters (GCs) studied to date show evidence for multiple stellar populations, in stark contrast to the conventional view that GCs are a mono-metallic, coeval population of stars. Building on earlier work, we propose a…
We have observed the CN features at $\sim$3800 ~\AA~ and 4120~ \AA~ as well as the CH band at $\sim$4300~\AA~ for 145 evolved stars in the Galactic globular cluster M71 using the multi-object spectrograph, Hydra, on the WIYN-3.5m telescope.…
In this paper we analyze the nuclear fusion rate between equal nuclei for all five different nuclear burning regimes in dense matter (two thermonuclear regimes, two pycnonuclear ones, and the intermediate regime). The rate is determined by…
The analysis of pseudo-colour diagrams, the so-called chromosome maps, of Galactic globular clusters (GCs) permits to classify them into type I and type II clusters. Type II GCs are characterized by an above-the-average complexity of their…