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

The bulk of the quiet solar photosphere is thought to be significantly magnetized, due to the ubiquitous presence of a tangled magnetic field at subresolution scales with an average strength langBrang ~ 100 G. This conclusion was reached through detailed three-dimensional (3D) radiative transfer modeling of the Hanle effect in the Sr I 4607 Å line