Related papers: SimClust - A Program to Simulate Star Clusters
The capture and gradual inspiral of stellar mass objects by a massive black hole at the centre of a galaxy has been proposed as one of the most promising source of gravitational radiation to be detected by LISA. Unfortunately rate estimates…
This lecture is an introduction to cosmological tests with clusters of galaxies. Here I do not intend to provide a complete review of the subject, but rather to describe the basic procedures to set up the fitting machinery to constrain…
We introduce a new method to measure the dispersion of mmax values of star clusters and show that the observed sample of mmax is inconsistent with random sampling from an universal stellar initial mass function (IMF) at a 99.9% confidence…
We present a new method for the mitigation of observational systematic effects in angular galaxy clustering via corrective random galaxy catalogues. Real and synthetic galaxy data, from the Kilo Degree Survey's (KiDS) 4$^{\rm{th}}$ Data…
Monte Carlo simulations are an important tool in statistical physics, complex systems science, and many other fields. An increasing number of these simulations is run on parallel systems ranging from multicore desktop computers to…
Star clusters stand at the crossroads between galaxies and single stars. Resolving the formation of star clusters in cosmological simulations represents an ambitious and challenging goal, since modelling their internal properties requires…
With the advent of several galaxy surveys targeting star-forming galaxies, it is important to have models capable of interpreting their spatial distribution in terms of astrophysical and cosmological parameters. To address this need, we…
We investigate the mechanism that leads to systematic deviations in cluster Monte Carlo simulations when correlated pseudo-random numbers are used. We present a simple model, which enables an analysis of the effects due to correlations in…
We study the geometry and topology of the large-scale structure traced by galaxy clusters in numerical simulations of a box of side 320 $h^{-1}$ Mpc, and compare them with available data on real clusters. The simulations we use are…
We determine the distribution of stellar surface densities, \Sigma, from models of static and dynamically evolving star clusters with different morphologies, including both radially smooth and substructured clusters. We find that the \Sigma…
What is the nature of a star forming clump? Observations reveal these to be chaotic environments being modified and influenced by many physical processes. However, numerical simulations often define these initial star forming clumps to be…
We present a new technique to fit color-magnitude diagrams of open clusters based on the Cross-Entropy global optimization algorithm. The method uses theoretical isochrones available in the literature and maximizes a weighted likelihood…
The main focus of the analysts who deal with clustered data is usually not on the clustering variables, and hence the group-specific parameters are treated as nuisance. If a fixed effects formulation is preferred and the total number of…
Aims. Monte Carlo Radiative Transfer (MCRT) simulations are a powerful tool for understanding the role of dust in astrophysical systems and its influence on observations. However, due to the strong coupling of the radiation field and medium…
We describe the scientific motivation behind, and the methodology of, the Stanford Cluster Search (StaCS), a program to compile a catalog of optically selected clusters of galaxies at intermediate and high (0.3 < z < 1) redshifts. The…
We review the background of the cluster algorithms in Monte Carlo simulation of statistical physics problems. One of the first such successful algorithm was developed by Swendsen and Wang eight years ago. In contrast to the local…
We introduce the Hydrangea simulations, a suite of 24 cosmological hydrodynamic zoom-in simulations of massive galaxy clusters (M_200c = 10^14-10^15 M_Sun) with baryon particle masses of ~10^6 M_Sun. Designed to study the impact of the…
Scattering of stars by interstellar clouds or massive clumps increases the stellar velocity dispersion and promotes a radial disk profile that is exponential. Here we show that such scattering reaches a steady-state distribution function of…
Aims: Stellar activity may complicate the analysis of high-precision radial-velocity spectroscopic data when looking for exoplanets signatures. We aim at quantifying the impact of stellar spots on stars with various spectral types and…
We present a new geometrical method aimed at determining the members of open clusters. The methodology estimates, in an N-dimensional space, the membership probabilities by means of the distances between every star and the cluster central…