We undertake the first high-resolution spectroscopic study of the Triangulum-Andromeda (TriAnd) star cloud—an extended, mid-latitude Milky Way (MW) halo substructure about 20 kpc away in the second Galactic quadrant— through six M giant star candidates selected to be both spatially and dynamically associated with this system. The abundance patterns

By tracing the distribution of cool dust in the extended envelopes of post-asymptotic giant branch stars and (proto)-planetary nebulae ((P)PNe), we aim to recover, or constrain, the mass-loss history experienced by these stars in their recent past. The Far-Infrared Surveyor (FIS) instrument on board the AKARI satellite was used to obtain far

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Over the last few years a large set of spectropolarimetric observations of prominences and spicules in the He I D3 multiplet have been collected at the observatory of the Istituto Ricerche Solari Locarno (IRSOL), using increasingly improved versions of the ZIMPOL polarimeter. The novel HAZEL inversion code of Stokes profiles generated by the joint

In addition to its search for extrasolar planets, the NASA Kepler mission provides exquisite data on stellar oscillations. We report the detections of oscillations in 500 solar-type stars in the Kepler field of view, an ensemble that is large enough to allow statistical studies of intrinsic stellar properties (such as mass, radius, and age) and to

Scattering polarization in complex atoms poses interesting theoretical problems and is interesting for diagnostic plasma purposes. Here, an elementary theory on the generation and transfer of scattering polarization and Hanle effect in complex atoms (chiefly, transition metals and rare earths) is introduced. It is based on the quantum mechanical