Related papers: How many low-mass stars do destroy 3He?
We investigate whether the observed high number of carbon- and nitrogen-enhanced extremely metal-poor stars could be explained by peculiar evolutionary properties during the core He flash at the tip of the red giant branch. For this purpose…
The Hipparcos mission has made it possible to constrain the positions of nearby field stars in the colour-magnitude diagram with very high accuracy. These positions can be compared with the predictions of stellar evolutionary calculations…
It is now widely accepted that globular cluster red giant branch stars owe their strange abundance patterns to a combination of pollution from progenitor stars and in situ extra mixing. In this hybrid theory a first generation of stars…
We study three processes that eject hypervelocity (>10^3 km/s) stars from the Galactic center: (i) close encounters of two single stars; (ii) tidal breakup of binary stars by the central black hole, as originally proposed by Hills; and…
We predict mass-loss rates for the late evolutionary phases of low-mass stars, with special emphasis on the consequences for the morphology of the Horizontal Branch (HB). We show that the computed rates, as predicted by the most plausible…
Thermohaline mixing has recently been proposed to occur in low-mass red giants, with large consequence for the chemical yields of low-mass stars. We investigate the role of thermohaline mixing during the evolution of stars between 1Msun and…
Once fixed the age and metallicity; the colour distribution of horizontal branch stars in a globular cluster depends on few parameters: the helium abundance of the population and the mass lost during the pre-HB stages. These parameters are…
Standard stellar evolution theory poorly predicts the surface abundances of chemical species in low-mass, red giant branch (RGB) stars. Observations show an enhancement of p-p chain and CNO cycle products in red giant envelopes, which…
Mapping lithium evolution for evolved stars will provide restrictions and constraints on the fundamental stellar interior physical processes, which further shed light on our understanding of the theory of stellar structure and evolution.…
We investigate the evolution of initially metal-free, low-mass Red Giant stars through the He core flash at the tip of the Red Giant Branch. The low entropy barrier between the helium- and hydrogen-rich layers enables a penetration of the…
We investigate the dependence of the carbon and oxygen production in stars on the 3-alpha rate by varying the energy of the 02+-state of 12C and determine the resulting yields for a selection of low-mass, intermediate-mass, and massive…
The method developed by Raffelt (1990a,b,c) to estimate a possible increase in the standard values of the helium-core mass at the tip of the red giant branch, $\Mc$, from properties of the color-magnitude diagrams of Galactic globular…
Extreme helium stars are very rare low-mass supergiants in a late stage of evolution. They are probably contracting to become white dwarfs following a violent phase of evolution which caused them to become hydrogen-deficient giants,…
We examine self-consistent parameterizations of the high-mass stellar population and resulting feedback, including mechanical, radiative, and chemical feedback, as we understand them locally. To date, it appears that the massive star…
In recent years several hypervelocity stars (HVSs) have been observed in the halo of our Galaxy. Such stars are thought to be ejected through dynamical interactions near the massive black hole (MBH) in the Galactic center. Three scenarios…
Determining the ages of red-giant stars is a key problem in stellar astrophysics. One of the difficulties in this determination is to know the evolutionary state of the individual stars -- i.e. have they started to burn Helium in their…
We determine the carbon isotopic ratios in the atmospheres of some evolved stars in both globular clusters and the disk of our Galaxy. Analysis of 12CO and 13CO bands at 2.3 micron was carried out using fits to observed spectra of red…
Thermohaline mixing has recently been proposed to occur in low mass red giants, with large consequence for the chemical yields of low mass stars. We investigate the role of thermohaline mixing during the evolution of stars between 1 Msun…
Based on spectroscopic constraints derived from NLTE line formation, we explore the likely range of stellar parameters (T_eff and log g) for the hyper-metal-poor (HMP) star HE 1327-2326. Combining the constraints from Balmer line profiles…
We have searched for star-forming galaxies at z~7 by applying the Lyman-break technique to newly-released 1.1micron Y-band images from WFC3 on HST. By comparing these images of the Hubble Ultra Deep Field with the ACS z'-band (0.85micron),…