Related papers: Open clusters and the galactic disk
The ensemble of all star clusters in a galaxy constitutes its star cluster system. In this review, the focus of the discussion is on the ability of star clusters, particularly the systems of old massive globular clusters (GCSs), to mark the…
Globular clusters are compact, gravitationally bound systems of up to a million stars. The GCs in the Milky Way contain some of the oldest stars known, and provide important clues to the early formation and continuing evolution of our…
Stellar populations, building blocks of galaxies, are direct tracers of the star formation history, the chemical enrichment and the assembly of galaxies in the Universe. They therfore allow us to understand how galaxies formed and evolved.…
Open clusters and associations are groups of young stars, respectively bound and unbound, that share the same origin and disperse over time into the galactic field. As such, their formation and evolution are the key to understand the origin…
Typical globular clusters (GCs - young and old) host stellar populations with little or no star-to-star variations in heavy elements (e.g., Ca, Fe) nor in age. Nuclear star clusters (NSCs), on the other hand, host complex stellar…
The contribution of white dwarfs of the different Galactic populations to the stellar content of our Galaxy is only poorly known. Some authors claim a vast population of halo white dwarfs, which would be in accordance with some…
Stars are born within dense clumps of giant molecular clouds, constituting young stellar agglomerates known as embedded clusters, which only evolve into bound open clusters under special conditions. We statistically study all embedded…
We study the relationship between the field star formation and cluster formation properties in a large sample of nearby dwarf galaxies. We use optical data from the Hubble Space Telescope and from ground-based telescopes to derive the ages…
Various cosmological applications of galaxy clusters are presented. Clusters are used to determine the baryon fraction, dark matter distribution and the matter density of the universe. They also contain a wealth of information about…
Blue straggler stars present as secure members in the Galactic open clusters form a major challenge to the conventional picture of evolutionary population synthesis based on the stellar evolution theory of single stars, as illustrated in…
We built Galactic open star cluster mass functions (CMFs) for different age sub-samples in the wider solar neighbourhood. We present a simple cluster formation and evolution model to reproduce the main features of the CMFs. We used an…
Galaxy clusters are connected at their peripheries to the large scale structures by cosmic filaments that funnel accreting material. These filamentary structures are studied to investigate both environment-driven galaxy evolution and…
Galaxy clusters as gravitational lenses play a unique role in astrophysics and cosmology: they permit mapping the dark matter distribution on a range of scales; they reveal the properties of high and intermediate redshift background…
We review several aspects of clusters of galaxies and their application to cosmology. We present first results of numerical simulations of the dynamics of the intra-cluster gas and of different interaction processes between cluster galaxies…
Radial migration is an important process in the Galactic disk. A few open clusters show some evidence on this mechanism but there is no systematic study. In this work, we investigate the role of radial migration on the Galactic disk based…
We employ optical photometry and high-resolution spectroscopy to study a field toward the open cluster Tombaugh 1, where we identify a complex population mixture, that we describe in terms of young and old Galactic thin disk. Of particular…
Stellar Populations are the fossil record of Galactic evolution. Interpretation of this record in the Local Group allows one to determine reliably the dominant physics controlling the evolution of those galaxies which are typical of the…
By virtue of their high galaxy space densities and their large spatial separations, clusters are efficient and accurate tracers of the large-scale density and velocity fields. Substantial progress has been made over the past decade in the…
We analyzed the shapes of Galactic open clusters by the star counting technique with the 2MASS star catalog database. Morphological parameters such as the ellipticity and size have been derived via stellar density distribution, weighed by…
We present a systematic investigation of 1,481 Galactic open clusters (OCs) through the application of the Limepy dynamical model, from which we derive the fundamental structural parameters of OCs. We conduct the statistical analyses on the…