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When the cosmic star formation history peaks (z ~ 2), galaxies vigorously fed by cosmic reservoirs are gas dominated and contain massive star-forming clumps, thought to form by violent gravitational instabilities in highly turbulent…
Estimating the age of the Universe is an old problem. Rapid progress in observational cosmology in recent years has led to more accurate values of the fundamental parameters. The current most popular model is a flat Universe, with about 30%…
Within a half-parsec from the Galactic center (GC), there is a population of coeval young stars which appear to reside in a coherent disk. Surrounding this dynamically-cool stellar system, there is a population of stars with a similar age…
In the last decade star clusters have been found in the centers of spiral galaxies across all Hubble types. We here present a spectroscopic study of the exceptionally bright (10^6 - 10^8 Lsun) but compact (Re ~ 5 pc) nuclear star clusters…
We present the results of combining Hubble Space Telescope optical photometry with ground-based Ks-band photometry from the Gemini imagers NIRI and FLAMINGOS-I to study the globular-cluster populations in four early-type galaxies that are…
The Milky Way has distinct structural stellar components linked to its formation and subsequent evolution, but disentangling them is nontrivial. With the recent availability of high-quality data for a large numbers of stars in the Milky…
We present a study of the globular cluster systems of four early-type poststarburst galaxies using deep g and I-band images from the ACS camera aboard the Hubble Space Telescope (HST). All the galaxies feature shells distributed around…
The giant elliptical galaxy NGC 1316 is the brightest galaxy in the Fornax cluster, and displays a number of morphological features that might be interpreted as an intermediate age merger remanent ($\sim$3 Gyr). Based on the idea that…
This paper is part of a project to search the inner Milky Way for hidden massive clusters and to address the question of whether our Galaxy still forms clusters similar to the progenitors of the present-day globular clusters. We report high…
We have identified perhaps the largest major galaxy merger ever seen. While analysing Spitzer IRAC images of CL0958+4702, an X-ray selected cluster at z=0.39, we discovered an unusual plume of stars extending $\gtrsim$110 kpc outward from…
The mysterious high galactic latitude cometary globule CG12 has been observed with the ACIS detector on board the Chandra X-ray Observatory. We detect 128 X-ray sources; half are likely young stars formed within the globule's head. This new…
We present spectroscopic ages, metallicities, and [alpha/Fe] ratios for 70 globular clusters in M31 that were derived from Lick line-index measurements. In addition to a population of old (>10 Gyr) globular clusters with a wide range of…
The properties of globular clusters in dwarf galaxies are key to understanding the formation of globular cluster systems, and in particular in verifying scenarios in which globular cluster systems of larger galaxies formed (at least partly)…
The classical globular clusters found in all galaxy types have half-light radii of $r_{\rm h} \sim$ 2-4 pc, which have been tied to formation in the dense cores of giant molecular clouds. Some old star clusters have larger sizes, and it is…
The Coma cluster is one of the richest known cluster of galaxies, spanning about 4 dex in density. Hence it is the ideal place to study the structure of galaxies as a function of environmental density in order to constrain the theories of…
Globular clusters produce orders of magnitude more millisecond pulsars per unit mass than the Galactic disk. Since the first cluster pulsar was uncovered twenty years ago, at least 138 have been identified - most of which are binary…
Reconstructing the mass assembly history of the Milky Way relies on obtaining detailed measurements of the properties of many stars in the Galaxy, especially in the stellar halo. One of the most constraining quantities is stellar age, as it…
We describe the structural and kinematic properties of the first compact stellar systems discovered by the AIMSS project. These spectroscopically confirmed objects have sizes ($\sim$6 $<$ R$_{\rm e}$ [pc] $<$ 500) and masses…
We present results on the age and metallicity estimates of the astonishingly unstudied SMC cluster ESO 51-SC09, from CCD BVI photometry obtained at the ESO NTT with the EMMI attached. ESO 51-SC09 turns out to be a relatively small cluster…
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…