Our observations with the ISO SWS revealed that H2O band at 2.7μm appears as absorption already in an M2 giant β Peg and strengthens towards later M giants. Further, CO2 4.2μm band appears as absorption in an M7 giant SWVir and especially strong in a Mira variable SVir. The excitation temperatures of these molecular bands estimated from their band shapes turn out to be 750 – 1,250K in M giants ...

We investigate giant and dual giant type BPS configurations in the nearhorizon geometry of a certain 1 16 -BPS AdS5 black hole. By quantising the space of solutions we count the dual giant configurations and compare with the black hole entropy. This suggests a missing degeneracy factor which we argue comes from an angular momentum quantum number. From the D-brane world volume this arises from B...

Parallaxes for 581 bright K giants have been determined using the Hipparcos satellite. We combine the trigonometric parallaxes with ground based photometric data to determine the K giant absolute magnitudes. For all these giants, absolute magnitude estimates can also be made using the intermediate band photometric DDO system (Janes 1975, 1979). We compare the DDO absolute magnitudes with the ve...

We present abundance results from our Keck/HIRES observations of giants in the Galactic Bulge. We confirm that the metallicity distribution of giants in the low-reddening bulge field Baade’s Window can be well-fit by a closed-box enrichment model. We also confirm previous observations that find enhanced [Mg/Fe], [Si/Fe] and [Ca/Fe] for all bulge giants, including those at super-solar metallicit...