Related papers: Hot Stars in Globular Clusters
In 1972, Zinn, Newell, & Gibson (ZNG) published a list of 156 candidate "UV-bright" stars they had found in 27 Galactic globular clusters (GCs), based on photographs in the U and V bands. UV-bright stars lie above the horizontal branch (HB)…
Little is known about the origins of the giant star clusters known as globular clusters. How can hundreds of thousands of stars form simultaneously in a volume only a few light years across the distance of the sun to its nearest neighbor?…
High-resolution optical spectra of thirteen blue horizontal-branch (BHB) stars in the globular cluster M13 show enormous deviations in element abundances from the expected cluster metallicity. In the hotter stars (T_eff > 12000 K), helium…
In four globular clusters (GCs) a non negligible fraction of stars can be interpreted only as a very helium rich population. The evidence comes from the presence of a "blue" main sequence in $\omega$ Cen and NGC 2808, and from the the very…
This review concentrates almost entirely on globular star clusters. It emphasises the increasing realisation that few of the traditional problems of star cluster astronomy can be studied in isolation: the influence of the Galaxy affects…
It is well appreciated that the description of overadiabatic convection affects the structure of the envelopes of luminous asymptotic giant branch (AGB) stars in the phase of ``hot bottom burning '' (HBB). We stress that this important…
We present a study of the globular cluster (GC) systems of nearby elliptical and S0 galaxies at a variety of wavelengths from the X-ray to the infrared. Our analysis shows that roughly half of the low mass X-ray binaries (LMXBs), that are…
AGB stars, the precursors of Planetary Nebulae, exhibit high rates of mass loss and eject material in the form of a slow (10-20 km/s), dusty molecular wind. The general belief that the dust component of AGB circumstellar envelopes have…
Populations of young star clusters show significant differences even among "normal" disk galaxies. In this contribution I discuss how properties of young cluster systems are related to those of their host galaxies, based on a recent study…
The efficiency of convection in stars affects many aspects of their evolution and remains one of the key-open questions in stellar modelling. In particular, the size of the mixed core in core-He-burning low-mass stars is still uncertain 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…
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…
Recent observations of heavy elements in Globular Clusters reveal intriguing deviations from the standard paradigm of the early galactic nucleosynthesis. If the r-process contamination is a common feature of halo stars, s-process…
V-band luminosity functions have been obtained for the upper main-sequence, sub-giant branch and red giant branch of 18 galactic globular clusters from HST data. A comparison with four sets of theoretical models has been performed. In…
Blue stragglers in globular clusters are abnormally massive stars that should have evolved off the stellar main sequence long ago. There are two known processes that can create these objects: direct stellar collisions and binary evolution.…
We present the first results of a survey of blue horizontal branch (BHB) stars in the Galactic bulge. 164 candidates with 15 < V < 17.5 in a field 7.5deg from the Galactic Center were observed in the blue at 2.4A FWHM resolution with the…
Asymptotic Giant Branch (AGB) winds from evolved stars not only provide a non-trivial amount of mass and energy return, but also produce dust grains in massive elliptical galaxies. Due to the fast stellar velocity and the high ambient…
Stars with very large mass loss on the red-giant branch can undergo the helium flash while descending the white-dwarf cooling curve. Under these conditions the flash convection zone will mix the hydrogen envelope with the hot helium-…
During their thermally pulsing phase, Asymptotic Giant Branch (AGB) stars eject material that forms extended dusty envelopes. Visible polarimetric imaging found clumpy dust clouds within two stellar radii of several oxygen-rich stars.…
The uncertainties in the modelling of some important inputs of stellar evolution must be taken into account for a correct interpretation, both of the HR diagrams of individual stars, and of the integrated colors, of stellar clusters. After…