My main research interests
Binary interaction products
About 50% of solar-like stars are born with a companion, and this fraction only increases at higher masses. Polluted stars that have received material from a companion in a binary system are excellent tracers of binary interaction processes and mass transfer models.
Low-mass evolved stars
Low- and intermediate-mass stars are the main source of carbon, dust and many heavy metals in their host galaxies. Understanding their evolution and the chemical reactions that operate in their interiors is crucial to understanding the chemical enrichment of the interstellar medium.
Stellar spectroscopy
The electromagnetic spectrum of a star contains powerful information about many stellar properties such as the temperature of a star, the chemical composition of its atmosphere, and the velocity it has in the line of sight of the observer.
My last paper contributions
Constraining the overcontact phase in massive binary evolution
III. Period stability of known B+B and O+B overcontact systems
Vrancken, J., Abdul-Masih, M., Escorza, A., Menon, A., Mahy, L. & Marchant, P. (2024)
Full abundance study of two newly discovered barium giants
Vitali, S., Escorza, A., Slumstrup, D. & Jofré, P. (2024)
An impressionist view of V Hydrae. When MATISSE paints asymmetric giant blobs
Planquart, L., Paladini, C., Jorissen, A., Escorza, A., et al. (2024)
Detection of extragalactic magnetic massive stars
Hubrig, S., Schöller, M., Järvinen, S. P., Cikota, A., Abdul-Masih, M., Escorza, A. & Jayaraman, R. (2024)
The Wide-field Spectroscopic Telescope (WST) Science White Paper
Complex K: Supernova Origin of Anomalous-velocity H I Structure
A dynamic view of V Hydrae. Monitoring of a spectroscopic-binary AGB star with an alkaline jet
Planquart, L., Jorissen, A., Escorza, A., Verhamme, O., Van Winckel, H (2024)
MELCHIORS. The Mercator Library of High Resolution Stellar Spectroscopy
A few talks available online
Invited seminar for the O-MESS online seminar series
The O-MESS (Online Meetings on Evolved Stars and Systems) seminar series consisted of weekly meetings, with two 30-minute seminars per week on evolved stars.
Invited seminar at the Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias
In 2020, I was invited to visit the Astronomy Institute of the Canary Islands and to present my freshly defended PhD Thesis in a seminar there. The visit had to be cancelled because of COVID-19 travel restrictions, but I gave my seminar and Zoom and the recording is available online.
Contributed talk at ImBaSE 2017
This is one of the few in-person conferences I have attended where all the talks are available online. The conference, organised by ESO, focused on the Impact of Binaries on Stellar Evolution, and I presented early results of my PhD work.