Related papers: The WFC3 Galactic Bulge Treasury Program: A First …
The unprecedented sensitivity and spatial resolution of next generation ground-based extremely large telescopes (ELTs) will open a completely new window on the study of resolved stellar populations. In this paper we study the feasibility of…
Three-body interactions can eject stars from the core of a globular cluster, causing them to enter the Galactic halo as extra-tidal stars. While finding extra-tidal stars is imperative for understanding cluster evolution, connecting…
A fundamental challenge for wide-field imaging surveys is obtaining follow-up spectroscopic observations: there are > $10^9$ photometrically cataloged sources, yet modern spectroscopic surveys are limited to ~few x $10^6$ targets. As we…
We present the initial results of a Hubble Space Telescope/ACS snapshot survey of 16 nearby, edge-on, late-type galaxies covering a range in distance from 2 to 19 Mpc. The images of these galaxies show significant resolved stellar…
This thesis focuses on the statistical properties of wide binary (WB) star systems in the Galactic field. For the present study we select a homogeneous sample covering about 675 square degrees in the direction of the NGP. It contains nearly…
We present deep Hubble Space Telescope imaging of five faint dwarf galaxies associated with the nearby spiral NGC 253 (D$\approx$3.5 Mpc). Three of these are newly discovered ultra-faint dwarf galaxies, while all five were found in the…
The inner mass-profile of the relaxed cluster Abell 1703 is analysed by two very different strong-lensing techniques applied to deep ACS and WFC3 imaging. Our parametric method has the accuracy required to reproduce the many sets of…
The Hubble Tarantula Treasury Project (HTTP) is an ongoing panchromatic imaging survey of stellar populations in the Tarantula Nebula in the Large Magellanic Cloud that reaches into the sub-solar mass regime (< 0.5 Mo). HTTP utilizes the…
Optimised population synthesis provides an empirical method to extract the relative mix of stellar evolutionary stages and the distribution of atmospheric parameters within unresolved stellar systems, yet a robust validation of this method…
We present homogeneous $V,I$ CCD photometry of nine stellar fields in the two inner quadrants of the Galactic plane. The lines-of-view to most of these fields aim in the direction of the very inner Galaxy, where the Galactic field is very…
We present a large and updated stellar evolution database for low-, intermediate- and high-mass stars in a wide metallicity range, suitable for studying Galactic and extragalactic simple and composite stellar populations using population…
Identification of specific stellar populations using photometry for spectroscopic follow-up is a first step to confirm and better understand their nature. In this context, we present an unsupervised machine learning approach to identify…
Context. Since the first publication of the Gaia catalogue a new view of our Galaxy has arrived. Its astrometric and photometric information has improved the precision of the physical parameters of open star clusters obtained from them.…
Upcoming wide-field surveys are well-suited to studying the growth of galaxy clusters by tracing galaxy and gas accretion along cosmic filaments. We use hydrodynamic simulations of volumes surrounding 324 clusters from \textsc{The…
We report on the current status of the University of New South Wales Extrasolar Planet Search project, giving details of the methods we use to obtain millimagnitude precision photometry using the 0.5m Automated Patrol Telescope. We use a…
By analyzing the spectral energy distributions (SEDs) of resolved stars in nearby galaxies, we can constrain their stellar properties and line-of-sight dust extinction. From the Scylla survey, we obtain ultraviolet to near-infrared…
A new generation of spectral synthesis models has been developed in the recent years, but there is no matching -- in terms of quality and resolution -- set of template galaxy spectra for testing and refining the new models. Our main goal is…
Context. This is the third paper of a series devoted to the WIde-field Nearby Galaxy-cluster Survey (WINGS).WINGS is a long term project aimed at gathering wide-field, multiband imaging and spectroscopy of galaxies in a complete sample of…
The astrometric satellite Gaia recently released part of its third data set, which provides a good opportunity to hunt for more open clusters in the Milky Way. In this work, we conduct a blind search for open clusters in the Galactic disk…
Traditional studies of stellar clusters in external galaxies use surface photometry and therefore focus on systems that are still bright and compact enough to be separated from the stellar background. Consequently, the latter stages of…