Related papers: Young Massive Clusters as probes of stellar evolut…

I will show that photometry -- if extending over a reasonable choice of passbands -- can give fairly precise information about young star clusters and their evolutionary state. Optical colors alone are known to leave severe ambiguities due…

An increasing number of young massive clusters (YMCs) in the Magellanic Clouds have been found to exhibit bimodal or extended main sequences (MSs) in their color--magnitude diagrams (CMDs). These features are usually interpreted in terms of…

Studies during the last decade have revealed that nearly all Globular Clusters (GCs) host multiple populations (MPs) of stars with a distinctive chemical patterns in light elements. No evidence of such MPs has been found so far in…

Feedback from Young Massive Clusters (YMCs) is an important driver of galaxy evolution. In the first few Myr, mechanical feedback is dominated by collective effects of the massive stellar winds in the YMC. The mass-loss rates and terminal…

Young massive clusters (YMCs) are dense aggregates of young stars and are often speculated as potential precursors to globular clusters. However, the formation mechanism of massive and compact gas clumps that precede YMCs remains unknown.…

We present a survey of 130 Galactic and extragalactic young massive clusters (YMCs, $10^4 < M/\msun < 10^8$, $10 < t/{\rm Myr} < 1000$) with integrated spectroscopy or resolved stellar photometry (40 presented here and 90 from the…

An overview of our current understanding of the formation and evolution of star clusters is given, with main emphasis on high-mass clusters. Clusters form deeply embedded within dense clouds of molecular gas. Left-over gas is cleared within…

Massive stars play a crucial role in the cosmic dynamics and chemical evolution of galaxies, however our understanding of their evolution and properties remains limited. An accurate determination of stellar parameters is essential for…

{Aims.} We present the main results of an imaging survey of possible young massive clusters (YMC) in M31 performed with the Wide Field and Planetary Camera2 (WFPC2) on the Hubble Space Telescope (HST). We present the images and color…

Recent photometric analysis of the colour-magnitude diagrams (CMDs) of young massive clusters (YMCs) have found evidence for splitting in the main sequence and extended main sequence turn-offs, both of which have been suggested to be caused…

Young massive clusters (YMCs) provide favorable environments for frequent stellar collisions, potentially leading to the formation of very massive stars (VMSs) and seeds of intermediate-mass black holes (IMBHs). We investigate the role of…

We propose that bound, young massive stellar clusters form from dense clouds that have escape speeds greater than the sound speed in photo-ionized gas. In these clumps, radiative feedback in the form of gas ionization is bottled up,…

The Antennae is a pair of late type spirals in the course of merging. The interaction triggered an ongoing strong burst of star formation that also produced a large number of Young Star Clusters (YSCs), many of which seem to be young…

The observable characteristics and subsequent evolution of young stellar populations is dominated by their massive stars. As our understanding of those massive stars and the factors affecting their evolution improves, so our interpretation…

Young super star clusters and young compact massive star forming regions can provide useful information on their burst properties (age, burst duration, SFR), the upper end of the IMF and yield new constraints on the evolution of massive…

Massive stars are key players in the evolution of galaxies, yet their formation pathway remains unclear. In this work, we use data from several galaxy-wide surveys to build an unbiased dataset of ~700 massive young stellar objects (MYSOs),…

Clusters are the dense inner regions of a wide-spread hierarchy of young stellar structures. They often reveal a continuation of this hierarchy inside of them, to smaller scales, when they are young, but orbital mixing eventually erases…

Star clusters are ideal tracers of star formation activity in systems outside the volume that can be studied using individual, resolved stars. These unresolved clusters span orders of magnitude in brightness and mass, and their formation is…

In many evolutionary stages, low- and intermediate-mass stars show signs of mixing of the surface material with material from the interior. To account for all the details revealed by the observations it is necessary to include non-standard…

Young massive (M >10^4 Msun) stellar clusters are a good laboratory to study the evolution of massive stars. Only a dozen of such clusters are known in the Galaxy. Here we report about a new young massive stellar cluster in the Milky Way.…