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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 April 2016
It is really impressive to see the amount of information astrophysicists have been able to extract from the analysis of that faint glimmering light that stars se,nd to tell us about them. The main piece of this analysis consists in dispersing the light to get the spectrum, that is to say intensity versus wavenumbers. From the measurements of wavenumbers it is possible to identify the atomic and molecular species from comparison with high-resolution laboratory spectroscopic data. Once the constituents have been identified, models can be constructed in order to simulate the metabolism of circumstellar atmospheres. In such models a crucial point is the abundance of the identified atomic and molecular constituents.