Related papers: Open clusters and the galactic disk
We carried out a search for new infrared star clusters, stellar groups and candidates using WISE images, which are very sensitive to dust emission nebulae. We report the discovery of 437 embedded clusters and stellar groups that show a…
The Nuclear Stellar Disk has been a highly active star-forming region in the Milky Way for approximately the last 30 million years. Despite hosting prominent clusters like Arches, Quintuplet, and Nuclear Stellar, their combined mass is less…
Open clusters (OCs) are infrequent survivors of embedded clusters gestated in molecular clouds. Up to now, little is known about the initial conditions for the formation of OCs. Here, we studied this issue using high-precision astrometric…
We have developed a star-counting algorithm and tested it on the 2MASS star catalog to search for density enhancements significantly above the field in Galactic latitude $|b|<50^{\circ}$. Nearly 500 open clusters are "rediscovered", along…
Embedded clusters are ideal laboratories to understand the early phase of the dynamical evolution of clusters as well as the massive star formation. An interesting observational phenomenon is that some of the embedded clusters show mass…
Clusters of galaxies have a huge mass which can act as gravitational lenses. Galaxies behind clusters can be distorted to form arcs in images by the lenses. Herein a search was done for giant lensed arcs by galaxy clusters using the SDSS…
We report the discovery of 25 new open clusters resulting from a search in dense low galactic latitude fields. We also provide, for the first time, structural and astrophysical parameters for the new findings and 34 other recently…
The mass function of galaxies and clusters of galaxies can be derived observationally based on different types of observations. In this study we test if these observations can be combined to a consistent picture which is also in accord with…
Observations indicate that present-day star formation in the Milky Way disk takes place in stellar ensembles or clusters rather than in isolation. Bound, long lived stellar groups are known as open clusters. They gradually lose stars and in…
This paper addresses the questions of what we have learned about how and when dense star clusters form, and what studies of star clusters have revealed about galaxy formation and evolution. One important observation is that globular…
The Galactic disk retains a vast amount of information about how it came to be, and how it evolved over cosmic time. However, we know very little about the secular processes associated with disk evolution. One major uncertainty is the…
The age distribution of the open cluster system is a key piece of information to decipher the star formation history of the Milky Way disk. Recently, a remarkable earlier drop of its older end was found, which caught our attention.…
Open clusters are convenient probes of the structure and history of the Galactic disk. They are also fundamental to stellar evolution studies. The second Gaia data release contains precise astrometry at the sub-milliarcsecond level and…
Clusters of galaxies at z>1 are expected to be increasingly active sites of star formation. To test this, an 850um survey was undertaken of eight high-redshift clusters at z=1.6-2.0 using SCUBA-2 on the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope.…
The formation and evolution of galactic disks is particularly important for understanding how galaxies form and evolve, and the cause of the variety in which they appear to us. Ongoing large surveys, made possible by new instrumentation at…
Low-mass cluster galaxies are the most common galaxy type in the universe and are at a cornerstone of our understanding of galaxy formation, cluster luminosity functions, dark matter and the formation of large scale structure. I describe in…
We present photometric and morphological analyses of nuclear star clusters (NSCs) -- very dense, massive star clusters present in the central regions of most galaxies -- in a sample of 33 massive disk galaxies within 20 Mpc, part of the…
Globular clusters (GCs) have been posited, alongside dwarf galaxies, as significant contributors to the field stellar population of the Galactic halo. In order to quantify their contribution, we examine the fraction of halo stars formed in…
Until recently it was thought that high Galactic latitude clouds were a non-star-forming ensemble. However, in a previous study we reported the discovery of two embedded clusters (ECs) far away from the Galactic plane ($\sim5$ kpc). In our…
A view of the Galactic bulge by means of their globular clusters is necessary for a deep understanding of its formation and evolution. Connections between the globular cluster and field star properties in terms of kinematics, orbits,…