相关论文: Blue Supergiants as a Tool for Extragalactic Dista…
Observing the stars in our night sky tells us that giant, supergiant and hypergiant stars hold an unique importance in the understanding of stellar populations. Theoretical stellar models predict a rich tapestry of evolved stars. These…
Over the last years a new generation of model atmosphere codes, which include the effects of metal line-blanketing of millions of spectral lines in NLTE, has been used to re-determine the properties of massive stars through quantitative…
Low-resolution LAMOST and Keck spectra of blue supergiant stars distributed over the disks of the Local Group spiral galaxies M 31 and M 33 are analyzed to determine stellar effective temperatures, gravities, metallicities, and reddening.…
Red Supergiants (RSGs) are cool (~4000K), highly luminous stars (L - 10^5 Lsun), and are among the brightest near-infrared (NIR) sources in star-forming galaxies. This makes them powerful probes of the properties of their host galaxies,…
In this paper we report on spatial intensity interferometry measurements within the H$\alpha$ line on two stars: the Luminous Blue Variable supergiant \PCygni\,and the late-type B supergiant Rigel. The experimental setup was upgraded to…
The extragalactic distance scale is fundamental to our understanding of astrophysics and cosmology. In recent years, the surface brightness fluctuation (SBF) method, applied in the near-IR, has proven especially powerful for measuring…
Cool red giants and supergiants are among the most complex and fascinating stars in the Universe. They are bright and large, and thus can be observed to enormous distances allowing us to study the properties of their host galaxies, such as…
We present an overview of a few spectroscopic diagnostics of massive stars. We explore the following wavelength ranges: UV (1000 to 2000 A), optical (4000--7000 A) and near-infrared (mainly H and K bands). The diagnostics we highlight are…
We analyze {\sl Hubble Space Telescope} observations of nine Large Magellanic Cloud star clusters with ages of 1--2 Gyr to search for evolved counterparts of blue straggler stars. Near the red clump regions in the clusters' color--magnitude…
Blue supergiant distances of nearby galaxies obtained with the flux-weighted gravity-luminosity relationship are used for a measurement of the zero points of Tully-Fisher relationships at different photometric passbands. The Cousins I-band…
The extragalactic high-energy $\gamma$-ray sky is dominated by blazars, which are active galactic nuclei with their jets pointing towards us. Distance measurements are of fundamental importance yet for some of these sources are challenging…
I review selected current observations of distant galaxies and our interpretation of the fragile (and occasionally contradictory) data. Galaxies at the ``contemporary limit'' of technology and redshift (z~6) are difficult to locate in the…
Surface Brightness Fluctuations (SBFs) are one of the most powerful techniques to measure the distance and to constrain the unresolved stellar content of extragalactic systems. For a given bandpass, the absolute SBF magnitude \bar{M}…
In this series of papers we have presented the results of a spectroscopic survey of luminous and variable stars in the nearby spirals M31 and M33. In this paper, we present spectroscopy of 132 additional luminous stars, variables, and…
The statistical power of weak lensing measurements is principally driven by the number of high redshift galaxies whose shapes are resolved. Conventional wisdom and physical intuition suggest this is optimised by deep imaging at long (red or…
Large-amplitude asymptotic giant branch variables potentially rival Cepheid variables as fundamental calibrators of the distance scale, particularly if observations are made in the infrared, or where there is substantial interstellar…
The Fermi Gamma-ray Observatory discovered about a thousand extragalactic sources emitting energy from 100 MeV to 100 GeV. The majority of these sources belong to the class of blazars characterized by a quasi-featureless optical spectrum…
The understanding of the nature of ultra-high-energy cosmic rays is one of the most intriguing open questions for current and future observatories. These particles are expected to be accelerated in extragalactic sources. Because of their…
I show that the standard microlensing technique to measure the angular radius of a star using color/surface-brightness relations can be inverted, via late-time proper motion measurements, to calibrate these relations. The method is…
Observational manifestations of far evolved stars at the asymptotic giants branch and their nearest descendants are briefly considered. Main results of their chemical composition determinations based on long term high resolution…