Constraints on light particles from stellar evolution

We examine the constraints imposed on the numbers and interactions of light particles by our understanding of the late stages of stellar evolution, including red giants, carbon-burning stars and cooling neutron stars. We show that these astrophysical considerations restrict the number of neutrino types to be less than 10^+2±1. This result complements the standard constraints from cosmological nucleosynthesis, which was unable to exclude numbers of neutrinos between a few thousand and the best particle physics limit of order 10⁵. We also investigate the constraints on supersymmetric theories with a light photino and gravitino, finding that the supersymmetry breaking scale parameter f>O(100GeV) and the selectron masses are >20 to 40 GeV. Finally, we study energy-loss rates by majoron and invisible axion emission.