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The Evolution of Massive Binary Stars
Marchant, Pablo; Bodensteiner, Julia
Massive stars play a major role in the evolution of their host galaxies and serve as important probes of the distant Universe. It has been established that the majority of massive stars reside in close binaries and interact with their companion stars during their lifetimes. Such interactions drastically alter their life cycles and complicate our u…
Exoplanet Statistics and Theoretical Implications
Dong, Subo; Zhu, Wei
In the past few years, significant advances have been made in understanding the distributions of exoplanet populations and the architecture of planetary systems. We review the recent progress of planet statistics, with a focus on the inner ≲1-AU region of planetary systems that has been fairly thoroughly surveyed by the Kepler mission. We also dis…
Microarcsecond Astrometry: Science Highlights from Gaia
Brown, Anthony G. A.
Access to microarcsecond astrometry is now routine in the radio, infrared (IR), and optical domains. In particular, the publication of the second data release (Gaia DR2) from the Gaia mission made it possible for every astronomer to work with easily accessible, high-precision astrometry for 1.7 billion sources to twenty-first magnitude over the fu…
Streams, Substructures, and the Early History of the Milky Way
Helmi, Amina
The advent of the second data release of the Gaia mission, in combination with data from large spectroscopic surveys, is revolutionizing our understanding of the Galaxy. Thanks to these transformational data sets and the knowledge accumulated thus far, a new, more mature picture of the evolution of the early Milky Way is currently emerging. Two of…
The Faintest Dwarf Galaxies
Simon, Joshua D.
The lowest luminosity (L < 105L⊙) Milky Way satellite galaxies represent the extreme lower limit of the galaxy luminosity function. These ultra-faint dwarfs are the oldest, most dark matter-dominated, most metal-poor, and least chemically evolved stellar systems known. They therefore provide unique windows into the formati…
Accuracy and Precision of Industrial Stellar Abundances
Jofré, Paula; Heiter, Ulrike; Soubiran, Caroline
There has been an incredibly large investment in obtaining high-resolution stellar spectra for determining chemical abundances of stars. This information is crucial to answer fundamental questions in astronomy by constraining the formation and evolution scenarios of the Milky Way as well as the stars and planets residing in it. We have just entere…