AGB Stars: Cosmic Element Forges
Asymptotic giant branch (AGB) stars are one of the main contributors of the chemical evolution of galaxies, and their ejecta represents an exceptional test for our theoretical knowledge of stellar…
Continue readingWhat will Betelgeuse do next?
John Percy (University of Toronto) tried to answer this question in an article, dated 2020, focused on the evolution of Betelgeuse Betelgeuse is not new to visible changes in luminosities….
Continue readingUnderstanding the life of stars with the James Webb Space Telescope
A meaningful comparison between the capabilities of the Hubble Space Telescope and the new James Webb Space Telescope What we can observe in the picture is the Carina Nebula, a…
Continue readingWhat are pulsars?
To work out what pulsars are, we must go back to massive stars exploding as supernovae, and to the “wild” idea of Fritz Zwicky. Despite the obvious importance of Jocelyn…
Continue readingStars and dust
Space is actually full of dust, which can impact the evolution of stars and even of whole galaxies The following picture is an artistic creation by the twelve-year-old Polish student…
Continue readingIntroducing IceCube
Built in one of the most extreme environments on Earth, IceCube is the largest neutrino telescope in the world. 300 scientists at 53 institutions in 12 different countries. This is…
Continue readingArcturus: the red queen of the spring night sky
About the same mass as the Sun, and with a radius around 25 times greater: Arcturus gives us a fairly good preview of how our star will be in about…
Continue readingNeutron star mergers as trans-iron elements factories!
The identification of strontium in the merger of two neutron stars in a binary system represents one of the major ground-breaking discoveries of the last decades The origins of the…
Continue readingType Ia Supernovae and Cosmology
The first robust evidence for the accelerated expansion of the universe (which led to the Nobel Prize in Physics 2011) was obtained using Type Ia Supernoave as “standard candles”. Most…
Continue readingUnveiling the Astrophysical Origins of the Elements: what are the major upcoming surveys?
The Vera Rubin Observatory (VRO), Euclid, NGRST, JWST and LISA are only some of the ambitious projects that will open a new window on the origin of the elements Supernovae,…
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