Related papers: Is Palomar 1 really associated with the Canis Majo…
We present the observational evidence of the 2-halo term in the stacked shear profile of a sample of about 1200 optically selected galaxy clusters based on imaging data and the public shear catalog from the CFHTLenS. We find that the halo…
An all high-latitude sky survey for cool carbon giant stars in the Galactic halo has revealed 75 such stars, of which the majority are new detections. Of these, more than half are clustered on a Great Circle on the sky which intersects the…
The failure of S and O abundances in most planetary nebulae to display the same strong direct correlation that is observed in extragalactic H II regions represents one of the most perplexing problems in the area of PN abundances today.…
The excess of diffuse galactic gamma rays above 1 GeV, as observed by the EGRET telescope on the NASA Compton Gamma Ray Observatory, shows all the key features from Dark Matter (DM) annihilation: (i) the energy spectrum of the excess is the…
The Galactic bulge, that is the prominent out-of-plane over-density present in the inner few kiloparsecs of the Galaxy, is a complex structure, as the morphology, kinematics, chemistry and ages of its stars indicate. To understand the…
The photometric estimate of the metallicity and the age of the Azzopardi et al. (1991, A&AS 88, 265) carbon stars (Ng 1997, A&A 328, 211) is revised to respectively Z~0.004 and ~0.1 Gyr. Under the hypothesis that the carbon stars are…
Using wide-field photometric data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) we recently showed that the Galactic globular cluster Palomar 5 is in the process of being tidally disrupted. Its tidal tails were initially detected in a 2.5 degree…
Nearby dwarf irregular galaxies were searched for compact star clusters using data from the HST archives. Three of the galaxies were found to host both populous clusters (M_V<-9.5 at a fiducial age of 10 Myr) and super-star clusters…
We have compiled a sample of globular clusters with high quality stellar abundances from the literature to compare to the chemistries of stars in the Galaxy and those in dwarf spheroidal galaxies. Of the 45 globular clusters examined, 29…
The relation between star formation rates and stellar masses, i.e. the galaxy main sequence, is a useful diagnostic of galaxy evolution. We present the distributions relative to the main sequence of 55 optically-selected PG and 12…
Globular cluster systems exhibit a bewildering variety of characteristics. No single scenario appears to be able to account for the wide range of specific globular cluster frequencies that are observed in galaxies of various types. The…
In the hierarchical theory of galaxy formation, a galaxy overdensity is a hallmark of a massive cosmic structure. However, it is less well understood how different types of galaxies trace the underlying large-scale structure. Motivated by…
We report the detection of a cross-correlation signal between {\it Fermi} Large Area Telescope diffuse gamma-ray maps and catalogs of clusters. In our analysis, we considered three different catalogs: WHL12, redMaPPer and PlanckSZ. They all…
CNO abundances in galaxies bear on issues of galactic evolution as well as stellar evolution and nucleosynthesis. Knowledge about them in dwarf and spiral galaxies depends mainly on emission lines from H II regions, with information from…
We examine a new scenario to model the outer halo globular cluster (GC) Pal 14 over its lifetime by performing a comprehensive set of direct N-body calculations. We assume Pal 14 was born in a now detached/disrupted dwarf galaxy with a…
We investigate the correlation of HCN 1-0 with dense gas mass in the Galactic center. We find that in general (on the ~10 pc size scale of individual molecular cloud cores) HCN 1-0 is well correlated with the dense molecular gas mass using…
The number of star clusters that populate the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) at deprojected distances < 4 deg has been recently found to be nearly double the known size of the system. Because of the unprecedented consequences of this outcome…
We report on the current status of our search for protoclusters around quasars at z > 4. While the search is still very incomplete, clustered companion galaxies are found in virtually every case examined so far. The implied comoving number…
The Sagittarius dwarf Spheroidal galaxy is the nearest neighbor of the Milky Way. Moving along a short period quasi-polar orbit within the Halo, it is being destroyed by the tidal interaction with our Galaxy, losing its stellar content…
Looking for and studying very distant galaxy clusters, clusters at z>1, are one of the prime subjects of the modern observational cosmology. If the metallicity of the hot intra-cluster medium in very distant galaxy clusters is measured for…