Related papers: The lost siblings of the Sun
An instability among the giant planets' orbits can match many aspects of the Solar System's current orbital architecture. We explore the possibility that this dynamical instability was triggered by the close passage of a star or substellar…
A star cluster in a galactic nucleus sinks toward the galactic center due to dynamical friction. As it spirals inward, the cluster loses mass due to stellar evolution, relaxation driven evaporation, and tidal stripping, eventually…
Molecular clouds at very high latitudes ($b > 60^o$) away from the Galactic plane are considered rare and not conventional sites of star formation. Contrary to this, the recent discovery of high latitude embedded Clusters can possibly…
A randomly chosen star in today's Universe is most likely to live in a galaxy with a stellar mass between that of the Milky Way and Andromeda. Yet it remains uncertain how the structural evolution of these bulge-disk systems proceeded. Most…
A significant proportion of Milky Way stars are born in stellar clusters, which dissolve over time so that the members become part of the disc and halo populations of the Galaxy. In the present work we will assume that these young stellar…
Implications of the recently discovered systematic abundance difference between the Sun and two collections of `solar twins' are discussed. The differences can be understood as an imprint on the abundances of the solar convection zone…
The Quintuplet, one of three massive stellar clusters in the Galactic center, is located about 30pc in projection from Sagittarius A*. Based on near-infrared K-band spectra we determine temperatures and luminosities for all stars in our…
Meteorites, which are remnants of solar system formation, provide a direct glimpse into the dynamics and evolution of a young stellar object (YSO), namely our Sun. Much of our knowledge about the astrophysical context of the birth of the…
Based on early solar system abundances of short-lived radionuclides (SRs), such as $^{26}$Al (T$_{1/2} = 0.74$ Myr) and $^{60}$Fe (T$_{1/2} = 1.5$ Myr), it is often asserted that the Sun was born in a large stellar cluster, where a massive…
The recent discoveries of nearby star clusters and associations within a few hundred pc of the Sun, as well as the order of magnitude difference in the formation rates of the embedded and open cluster populations, suggests that additional…
Recent studies of solar system formation suggest that the solar system's giant planets formed and migrated in the protoplanetary disk to reach resonant orbits with all planets inside 15 AU from the Sun. After the gas disk's dispersal,…
The nature of our Milky Way Galaxy is reexamined from an eclectic point of view. Evidence for a central bar, for example, is not reflected in the distribution of RR Lyrae variables in the central bulge [4,5], and it is not clear if either a…
We found that 10 metal-poor globular clusters are greately distinguished for anomalously small masses on the "destruction rate--mass" plain. As it turned out, these poor clusters, situated 15 kpc farther from the Galactic centre, are…
Within the distance of 1 pc from the Galactic center (GC), more than 100 young massive stars have been found. The massive stars at 0.1-1 pc from the GC are located in one or two disks, while those within 0.1 pc from the GC, S-stars, have an…
We perform N-body simulations of a cluster that forms in a dwarf galaxy and is then accreted by the Milky Way to investigate how a cluster's structure is affected by a galaxy merger. We find that the cluster's half mass radius will respond…
Globular clusters (GCs) display much lower binary fractions than found among main-sequence stars in the solar neighborhood. The physical cause of this difference is debatable: does it reflect different star formation outcomes at low…
High-resolution, high signal-to-noise spectral data are presented for four young B-type stars lying towards the Galactic Centre. Determination of their atmospheric parameters from their absorption line profiles, and uvby photometric…
More than 50 years have elapsed since the first studies of star clusters in the Magellanic Clouds. The wealth of data accumulated since then has not only revealed a large cluster system, but also a diversified one, filling loci in the age,…
We study the Galactic distribution of normal pulsars with 1400 MHz luminosities greater than 0.1 mJy kpc^2 refining the shape and parameters of the radial distribution of pulsars. To estimate the distances to pulsars we used the new NE2001…
Planetary Nebulae are the ionised ejected envelopes surrounding the remnant cores of dying stars. Theory predicts that main-sequence stars with one to about eight times the mass of our sun may eventually form planetary nebulae. Until now no…