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Up: Grids of stellar

1. Introduction

This new grid of stellar models is an extension of the previous ones computed by the Geneva Group (Schaller et al. 1992, hereafter Paper I; Schaerer et al. 1993a, Paper II; Charbonnel et al. 1993, Paper III; Schaerer et al. 1993b, Paper IV; Meynet et al. 1994, Paper V; Charbonnel et al. 1996, Paper VI; Bernasconi 1996; Charbonnel et al. 1997), presenting the evolution of stars from 0.8 to tex2html_wrap_inline1053 for a metallicity of Z=0.10.

A grid of stellar models at such high metallicity is well adapted for the study of stellar populations in highly evolved regions such as galactic bulges, elliptical galaxies and eventually quasars. In those environments, the metallicity might reach up to 3 to 5 times the solar one (see e.g. McWilliam & Rich 1994; see also Simpson et al. 1995). Metallicities up to 10 times have even been claimed in the case of quasars (Korista et al. 1996), but such values are highly uncertain. Papers IV and V have already presented the evolution of metal-rich stars at Z=0.04, about twice the solar metallicity. In this paper, we present stellar models computed at Z=0.1, i.e. at five times the solar metallicity.

Similar calculations have been published by Fagotto et al. (1994). Their calculations are, however, restricted to stellar masses tex2html_wrap_inline1097 tex2html_wrap_inline1099 and do not take into account mass loss during the evolution. Moreover, they used the old radiative opacities by Huebner et al. (1977).

The model ingredients are described in Sect. 2. Section 3 presents briefly the results. Directives on how to obtain the full data tables are given in Sect. 4.

A detailed analysis of the characteristics of metal-rich stars is presented in a parallel paper (Mowlavi et al. 1997).



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