This specialized workshop was conceived during the workshop on "Non isotropic and Variable Outflows from Stars", which was held at the Space Telescope Science Institute in October, 1991. At that meeting, the four of us collectively decided that the time was ripe for an even more focussed discussion of the basic issues in the area of hot-star wind instability and its observable manifestations. Not that the big problems have been solved! Rather, we are currently in a phase of rapid development, both with regard to the models and to the observations. The key issue at this new workshop would be to decide how the time-dependent structures observed in hot-star winds (e. g. , NACs, DACs, blobs, clumps, filaments, shells, puffs, jets, etc. ) relate to radiative and other instabilities. Further questions concern the role of turbulence and the nature of its driver, and the effect of stellar rotation, pulsation, and magnetic fields on time-dependent phenomena in hot-star winds. Of no less importance is the impact of stellar wind variability on the derivation of mass-loss rates, on stellar evolution, and on momentum/energy deposition in the interstellar medium. To attain our goal of maximum confrontation (in the positive sense!) we decided: (1) to limit the workshop to the observers and theoreticians most active in this field in the world; (2) to insist that virtually all participants present a talk, thereby avoiding the distraction of poster sessions; and (3) to allocate approximately half of the allotted time to discussion.

Reviews our current understanding of the life, evolution and death of massive stars; for researchers and graduate students.

Stellar models are the very basic building blocks with which we build up our knowledge of the Universe. New numerical experiments are heralding a new level of sophistication in our ability to model, and understand, how stars work. This volume provides an overview and the most recent advances in modeling of stellar structure and evolution. Modeling of stars relies on our understanding of the detailed physical processes happening in stars, and the most recent observations of stars made by modern large telescopes and current high technologies. IAU Symposium 252 presents the most recent developments in five key areas, including: improvements of the physical ingredients of stellar models; the evolution of low and intermediate mass stars; the evolution of massive stars; close binary evolution; and stellar physics in the era of very large telescopes. This overview of stellar research is at a level suitable for research astronomers and graduate students.

Long-term monitoring is of fundamental significance in solving many important problems in astrophysics and, furthermore, has unequalled value in extending observational runs with small telescopes for the education of young astronomers in order to teach them how to secure high-quality observational data over many years. The Impact of Long-Term Monitoring on Variable Star Research contains reports based on the analysis of data collected in the visible, IR and radio measurement ranges, as well as the design and history of well known photometric systems. Though the reporting of novel results forms an important part of the book, there are also reports of eight discussion sessions covering more general areas, such as extinction monitoring, the problems of archival storage of astronomical data, service observation, the role played by long-term monitoring in graduate teaching and thesis supervision, the interplay between the great observational effort and theory, the contribution of LTM to new knowledge of fundamental data, and the increasing decommissioning of telescopes of modest aperture.

This book presents the status of research on very massive stars in the Universe. While it has been claimed that stars with over 100 solar masses existed in the very early Universe, recent studies have also discussed the existence and deaths of stars up to 300 solar masses in the local Universe. This represents a paradigm shift for the stellar upper-mass limit, which may have major implications far beyond the field of stellar physics. The book comprises 7 chapters, which describe this discipline and provide sufficient background and introductory content for graduate (PhD) students and researchers from different branches of astronomy to be able to enter this exciting new field of very massive stars.

This thesis describes the application of a Monte Carlo radiative transfer code to accretion disc winds in two types of systems spanning 9 orders of magnitude in mass and size. In both cases, the results provide important new insights. On small scales, the presence of disc winds in accreting white dwarf binary systems has long been inferred from the presence of ultraviolet absorption lines. Here, the thesis shows that the same winds can also produce optical emission lines and a recombination continuum. On large scales, the thesis constructs a simple model of disc winds in quasars that is capable of explaining both the observed absorption and emission signatures – a crucial advance that supports a disc-wind based unification scenario for quasars. Lastly, the thesis also includes a theoretical investigation into the equivalent width distribution of the emission lines in quasars, which reveals a major challenge to all unification scenarios.