Related papers: Primordial Globular Clusters, X-Ray Binaries & Cos…
We discuss some of the key open questions regarding the formation and evolution of globular clusters (GCs) during galaxy formation and assembly within a cosmological framework. The current state-of-the-art for both observations and…
The masses of star clusters range over seven decades, from ten up to one hundred million solar masses. Remarkably, clusters with masses in the range 10^4 to 10^6 solar mases show no systematic variation of radius with mass. However, recent…
Globular clusters contain many stars with surface abundance patterns indicating contributions from hydrogen burning products, as seen in the anti-correlated elemental abundances of e.g. sodium and oxygen, and magnesium and aluminium.…
Luminous elliptical galaxies generally display a rich star cluster system, whose properties provide strong constraints on the physics of galaxy formation and evolution. Star cluster system studies, however, concentrate on galaxies located…
Quiescent low-mass X-ray binaries (qLMXBs) containing neutron stars have been identified in several globular clusters using Chandra or XMM X-ray observations, using their soft thermal spectra. We report a complete census of the qLMXB…
Mergers of gas-rich galaxies lead to gravitationally driven increases in gas pressure that can trigger intense bursts of star and cluster formation. Although star formation itself is clustered, most newborn stellar aggregates are unbound…
We summarize the results of recent theoretical work on the dynamical evolution of globular clusters containing primordial binaries. Even a very small initial binary fraction (e.g., 10%) can play a key role in supporting a cluster against…
We summarize the status of art of the secular evolution of low mass X-ray binaries (LMXBs) and take a close look at the orbital period distribution of LMXBs and of binary millisecond pulsars (MSP), in the hypothesis that this latter results…
Globular Cluster (GC) formation seems to be a widespread mode of star formation in extreme starbursts triggered by strong interactions and mergers of massive gas-rich galaxies. We use our detailed chemically consistent evolutionary…
In this paper, the second of a series, we study the stellar dynamical and evolutionary processes leading to the formation of compact binaries containing neutron stars (NSs) in dense globular clusters (GCs). For this study, 70 dense clusters…
In the present work we investigate the link between high-mass X-ray binaries (HMXBs) and star formation in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), our nearest star-forming galaxy. Using optical photometric data, we identify the most likely…
Using radiation-hydrodynamic cosmological simulations, we present a detailed ($0.1$ pc resolution), physically motivated portrait of a typical-mass dwarf galaxy before the epoch of reionization, resolving the formation and evolution of star…
We present 23 candidate X-ray binaries with luminosities down to 1.8x10^36 erg/s, in the nearby starburst galaxy NGC 4449, from observations totaling 105 ksec taken with the ACIS-S instrument on the Chandra Space Telescope. We determine…
The large-scale overdensities of galaxies at z~2-7 known as protoclusters are believed to be the sites of cluster formation, and deep, wide survey projects such as the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) and the Wide Field Infrared…
Combined HST, X-ray, and ground-based optical studies show that clusters of galaxies are largely "in place" by $z \sim 1$, an epoch when the Universe was less than half its present age. High resolution images show that elliptical, S0, and…
We use semi-analytic techniques to study the formation and evolution of brightest cluster galaxies (BCGs). We show the extreme hierarchical nature of these objects and discuss the limits of simple ways to capture their evolution. In a model…
How Very Young Massive star Clusters (VYMCs; also known as "starburst" clusters), which typically are of $\gtrsim 10^4M_\odot$ and are a few Myr old, form out of Giant Molecular Clouds is still largely an open question. Increasingly…
We present the first direct measurement of the spatial cross-correlation function of high-mass X-ray binaries (HMXBs) and active OB star-forming complexes in the Milky Way. This result relied on a sample containing 79 hard X-ray selected…
There have been several recent claims of black hole binaries in globular clusters. I show that these candidate systems could instead be ultracompact X-ray binaries (UCXBs) in which a neutron star accretes from a white dwarf. They would…
Binary stars have long been considered to play a crucial role in globular cluster evolution, and offer the advantages of studying systems at the same, well-determined distances. However, early search attempts were consistently thwarted by…