THE AGB NEWSLETTER An electronic publication dedicated to Asymptotic Giant Branch stars and related phenomena Official publication of the IAU Working Group on Abundances in Red Giants No. 168 — 6 July 2011 http://www.astro.keele.ac.uk/AGBnews Editors: Jacco van Loon and Albert Zijlstra Editorial Dear Colleagues, It is a pleasure to present you the 168th issue of the AGB Newsletter. There are in particular a lot of Spitzer, Herschel, and other mid-IR results, abundances and nucleosynthesis, and results on pulsating variables, dust, symbiotic binaries and the progenitors of SNe of type Ia, and some (other) weird classes of objects. And more. Bowshocks, surprising results about nearby galaxies and important results on the most distant ones... To celebrate Dr. Shuji Deguchi’s achievements, a very interesting meeting on evolved stars and astrophysical masers is organised to take place in Hong Kong later this year. The next issue is planned to be distributed in early August 2011. Editorially Yours, Jacco van Loon and Albert Zijlstra Food for Thought This month’s thought-provoking statement is: What happens when the pulsation period approaches the thermal timescale? Reactions to this statement or suggestions for next month’s statement can be e-mailed to
[email protected] (please state whether you wish to remain anonymous) 1 Refereed Journal Papers Chemical composition of the RS CVn-type star 33 Piscium G. Bariseviˇcius1, G. Tautvaiˇsien˙e1, S. Berdyugina2, Y. Chorniy1 and I. Ilyin3 1Institute of Theoretical Physics and Astronomy, Vilnius University, Goˇstauto 12, Vilnius, LT-01108, Lithuania 2Kiepenheuer Institut f¨ur Sonnenphysik, Sch¨oneckstraße 6, D-79104 Freiburg, Germany 3Astrophysical Institute Potsdam, an der Sternwarte 16, D-14482 Potsdam, Germany Abundances of 22 chemical elements, including the key elements and isotopes such as 12C, 13C, N and O, are inves- tigated in the spectrum of 33 Psc, a single-lined RS CVn-type binary of low magnetic activity.