Found 132 talks archived in Stars

Up to now more than 400 extrasolar planets have been discovered, about 60 of them are transiting. Transiting extra-solar planets are particularly interesting, because their masses, diameters, densities and orientations of their orbits can be determined. Observations with the CoRoT Satellite have now turned up 10 transiting extrasolar planets. Although most of them are gas giants, it turns out that each of them is very special, and many of them have surprising properties. An unexpected discovery was for example the detection of emission lines from CoRoT 1b. Other interesting discoveries are CoRoT 2b, a planet orbiting a young star, and CoRoT 3b the first transiting brown dwarf orbiting a main sequence star. While the detection of transiting gas giants is interesting, the ultimate goal of CoRoT clearly was the detection of rocky planets. CoRoT has detected a solar-like star which shows transits that are only 0.03% deep. In this talk it it is demonstrated that this planet is in fact the first planet found outside our solar system from which we can firmly say that it is a rocky planet. New observations of this interesting object even constrain the properties of its exosphere.

The formation of massive stars is not fully understood. The high luminosity and temperature of massive protostars complicate the accretion mechanism at work in intermediate and low mass young stellar objects. Nonetheless, several scenarios exist to explain the formation of massive stars. In this talk, we will focus on the process of triggered star formation on the borders of H II regions. Due to the feedback effects of OB stars, a layer of molecular material is collected during the expansion of the H II region. Instabilities develop in this layer and give birth to new stars. We will present a detailed study of three Galactic H II regions (RCW79, RCW82 and RCW120). Near-infrared integral field observations have been carried out with SINFONI on the VLT. We will see how they reveal the nature of both the ionizing stars and of the YSOs in the collected layer and how they support the scenario of 'triggered star formation'.

I present some recent results from our Optical and NIR studies of five short period low-mass X-ray binaries (LMXB's; X1822-371, X1957+115, UW CrB, X1916-05 and X0614+091). Optical photometry and spectroscopy reveal some surprising results on the geometry and evolution of accretions discs in LMXB's. Based on our data, it is increasingly clear that accretion discs in these systems are far from being stable and must undergo substantial precession and/or warping behaviour on timescales less than a day in case of the shortest period systems.