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Hot subluminous stars

Hot subluminous stars of spectral type B and O are core helium-burning stars at the blue end of the horizontal branch or have evolved even beyond that stage. Strikingly, the distribution in the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram of He-rich vs. He-poor hot subdwarf stars of the globular clusters omega Cen and NGC~2808 differ from that of their field counterparts. The metal-abundance patterns of hot subdwarfs are typically characterized by strong deficiencies of some lighter elements as well as large enrichments of heavy elements. A large fraction of sdB stars are found in close binaries with white dwarf or very low-mass main sequence companions, which must have gone through a common-envelope phase of evolution.They provide a clean-cut laboratory to study this important but yet purely understood phase of stellar evolution. Substellar companions to sdB stars have also been found. For HW~Vir systems the companion mass distribution extends from the stellar into the brown dwarf regime. A giant planet to the pulsator V391 Peg was the first discovery of a planet that survived the red giant evolution of its host star. Several types of pulsating star have been discovered among hot subdwarf stars, t