There is a type of stars connecting giant planets and stars: the brown dwarfs. These “failed stars” have a mass ranging from 13 to 80 Jupiter masses, enough to ignite deuterium burning, but not hydrogen such as main sequence stars. It is still not clear whether brown dwarfs form like planets or like stars. Planets form in protoplanetary
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Many, maybe most, of the stars in our Galaxy born in clusters. However, even if star formation in clusters is one of the main modes of star formation in the Milky Way, we still have not fully understood how stellar clusters form, evolve, and disperse. A detailed study on the evolution of stellar clusters requires the analysis of the
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The study of the evolution of the Milky Way is one of the main tasks of the Gaia-ESO Survey (link). To this aim, the analysis of the stellar population of the galactic bulge is of particular importance. The bulge is in fact populated by old stars, likely formed in the early evolution of our Galaxy. To date, two scenarios have
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di Mario Giuseppe Guarcello ( segui mguarce) Lo studio delle regioni di formazione stellare prossimi al Sole riveste una grande importanza. Stelle giovani vicine a noi, infatti, possono essere analizzate in grande dettaglio con la strumentazione disponibile, più o meno su tutto lo spettro elettromagnetico. Le dettagliate e stupende immagini ALMA dei dischi protoplanetari vicini al Sole, colti nell’atto
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More than 300 experts in high-energy astrophysics from all around the globe have participated to the meeting “X-ray Universe 2017”, which finishes today. The “X-ray Universe”, organized by ESA with the participation of several institutions such as INAF, is one of the most important periodic meeting about high-energy astrophysics, mainly focused on X-ray astronomy. This year it has been
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Observing how the light emitted by stars changes with the time can be an interesting hobby, but it can also be something more important: an important and powerful diagnostic for something that can be hardly studied with some other approach… This can be particularly important for pre-main sequence stars with protoplanetary disks. In these stars, in fact, important and
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Exoplanets research has a wide appeal on the public and the scientific community. This mainly thanks to the results of successful missions such as CoRoT and Kepler, which allowed us to identify to date 3610 exoplanets, with more than 2000 candidates (link). However, the search for exoplanets is only part of this important branch of astrophysics, which faces several important questions still without answer:
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di Mario Giuseppe Guarcello ( segui mguarce) Esistono vari modelli che cercano di spiegare la formazione e l’evoluzione del disco sottile della Via Lattea, della sua popolazione stellare e dei bracci a spirale. Uno dei parametri fondamentali per il processo di formazione stellare nel disco, la distribuzione di massa delle stelle, l’evoluzione stellare e la migrazione lungo il disco
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The star formation process starts with the gravitational collapse of large and cold clouds of gas and dust. Despite it sounds like a simple process, it is actually very complicated and we still lack full comprehension of the details of how these clouds can form clusters and associations of young stars. This is one of the main objectives of
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Experts in exoplanets have reached Palermo to attend the 10th GAPS (Global Architecture of Planetary Systems) Progress Meeting, that will take place from May 15th to 17th in Palermo at the Orto Botanico. The meeting is organized by the Astronomical Observatory of Palermo. GAPS is an ambitious program aiming at characterizing known exoplanetary systems, i.e. determining the orbits of the
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