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Stars form in clustered environments, but how they form when the available resources are shared is still not well understood. A related question is whether the IMF is in fact universal across galactic environments, a galactic initial mass…
The age of an individual star cannot be measured, only estimated through mostly model-dependent or empirical methods, and no single method works well for a broad range of stellar types or for a full range in age. This review presents a…
Binary stars play a crucial role in our understanding of the formation and evolution of star clusters and their stellar populations. We use Gaia Data Release 3 to homogeneously analyze 78 Galactic open clusters and the unresolved binary…
Clustering is widely studied in statistics and machine learning, with applications in a variety of fields. As opposed to classical algorithms which return a single clustering solution, Bayesian nonparametric models provide a posterior over…
We propose a new method to infer the star formation histories of resolved stellar populations. With photometry one may plot observed stars on a colour-magnitude diagram (CMD) and then compare with synthetic CMDs representing different star…
We review a range of stastistical methods for analyzing the structures of star clusters, and derive a new measure ${\cal Q}$ which both quantifies, and distinguishes between, a (relatively smooth) large-scale radial density gradient and…
Stellar ages are critical building blocks of evolutionary models, but challenging to measure for low mass main sequence stars. An unexplored solution in this regime is the application of probabilistic machine learning methods to…
The degree of influence that environment and mass have on the stellar populations of early-type galaxies is uncertain. In this paper we present the results of a spectroscopic analysis of the stellar populations of early-type galaxies aimed…
Context: Astronomy and astrophysics demand rigorous handling of uncertainties to ensure the credibility of outcomes. The growing integration of artificial intelligence offers a novel avenue to address this necessity. This convergence…
Binary stars have been shown to have a substantial impact on the integrated light of stellar populations, particularly at low metallicity and early ages - conditions prevalent in the distant Universe. But the fraction of stars in stellar…
Mixture models combine multiple components into a single probability density function. They are a natural statistical model for many situations in astronomy, such as surveys containing multiple types of objects, cluster analysis in various…
Bayesian clustering methods have the widely touted advantage of providing a probabilistic characterization of uncertainty in clustering through the posterior distribution. An amazing variety of priors and likelihoods have been proposed for…
Various methods for age dating globular clusters in ellipticals are presented. We first present spectroscopy of individual globular clusters (feasible with the advent of the 10m-class telescopes), and the measurement of Balmer line indices.…
We present a new technique to quantify cluster-to-cluster variations in the observed present-day stellar mass functions of a large sample of star clusters. Our method quantifies these differences as a function of both the stellar mass and…
We describe a novel method for determining the demographics of a population of star clusters, for example distributions of cluster mass and age, from unresolved photometry. This method has a number of desirable properties: it fully exploits…
We explore the cosmological halo-to-halo scatter of the distribution of mass within dark matter halos utilizing a well-resolved statistical sample of clusters from the cosmological Millennium simulation. We find that at any radius, the…
The integrated light of a stellar population, measured through photometric filters that are sensitive to the presence of young stars, is often used to infer the star formation rate (SFR) for that population. However, these techniques rely…
Derived from first physical principles, a few simple rules are presented that can help in both the planning and interpretation of CCD and IR-array camera observations of resolvable stellar populations. These rules concern the overall size…
Spectra of galaxies contain an enormous amount of information about the relative mixture of ages and metallicities of constituent stars. We present a comprehensive study designed to extract the maximum information from spectra of data…
Maximum likelihood estimates (MLEs) are asymptotically normally distributed, and this property is used in meta-analyses to test the heterogeneity of estimates, either for a single cluster or for several sub-groups. More recently, MLEs for…