Related papers: A massive association around the obscured open clu…

Massive clusters are more often found in actively star forming galaxies than in quiescent ones, similar to the Milky Way. We have carried out an extensive survey of obscured Milky Way clusters to determine whether our Galaxy is still…

We report the discovery of an extraordinarily massive young cluster of stars in the Galaxy, having an inferred total initial cluster mass comparable to the most massive young clusters in the Galaxy. Using {\it IRMOS}, {\it 2MASS}, and {\it…

The Galactic open cluster Westerlund 1 was found only a few years ago to be much more massive than previously thought, with evidence suggesting its mass to be in excess of ~10^5 Msun, in the range spanned by young extragalactic star…

An earlier analysis of the Milky Way Star Cluster (MWSC) catalogue revealed an apparent lack of old (> 1 Gyr) open clusters in the solar neighbourhood (< 1 kpc). To fill this gap we undertook a search for hitherto unknown star clusters,…

We report evidence of a fully established galaxy cluster at z=2.07, consisting of a ~20sigma overdensity of red, compact spheroidal galaxies spatially coinciding with extended X-ray emission detected with XMM-Newton. We use VLT VIMOS and…

We study 203 (of 442) Swift AGN and Cluster Survey extended X-ray sources located in the SDSS DR8 footprint to search for galaxy over-densities in three dimensional space using SDSS galaxy photometric redshifts and positions near the Swift…

The Scutum complex in the inner disk of the Galaxy hosts a number of young clusters and associations of red supergiant stars that are heavily obscured by dust extinction. These stars are important tracers of the recent star formation and…

Three new obscured Milky Way clusters were detected as surface density peaks in the 2MASS point source catalog during our on-going search for hidden globular clusters and massive Arches-like star clusters. One more cluster was discovered…

Red supergiants (RSGs) are essential to understanding the evolution and the contribution to the interstellar medium of massive stars. However, the number of identified RSGs within the Milky Way is still limited mainly due to the difficulty…

Young massive star clusters, like the six red supergiant clusters in the Scutum complex, provide valuable insights into star-formation and galaxy structures. We investigated the high-resolution near-infrared spectra of 60 RSG candidates in…

We report on the discovery of a new Milky Way companion stellar system located at (RA, Dec) = (22h10m43.15s, +14:56:58.8). The discovery was made using the eighth data release of SDSS after applying an automated method to search for…

We report mid- to far-infrared imaging and photomety from 7 to 37 microns with SOFIA/FORCAST and 2 micron adaptive optics imaging with LBTI/LMIRCam of a large sample of red supergiants (RSGs) in four Galactic clusters; RSGC1,…

Observations of the galactic disk at mid-infrared and longer wavelengths reveal a wealth of structures indicating the existence of complexes of recent massive star formation. However, little or nothing is known about the stellar component…

We present a study of the luminosity density distribution of the Galactic bar using number counts of red clump giants (RCGs) from the OGLE-III survey. The data were recently published by Nataf et al. (2013) for 9019 fields towards the bulge…

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 report the discovery of an X-ray luminous galaxy cluster at z =1.11. RDCS J0910+5422 was selected as an X-ray cluster candidate in the ROSAT Deep Cluster Survey on the basis of its spatial extent in a Rosat PSPC image. Deep optical and…

Using accurate positions from very deep radio observations to guide multi-object Keck spectroscopy, we have determined a substantially complete redshift distribution for very luminous, distant submillimeter(submm)-selected galaxies (SMGs).…

The location of the Scutum Red-Supergiant (RSG) clusters at the end of the Galactic Bar makes them an excellent probe of the Galaxy's secular evolution; while the clusters themselves are ideal testbeds in which to study the predictions of…

CONTEXT. One of the most difficult and unexplored regions of the Milky Way is the highly extincted in-plane central region within the Galactic coordinates $10^\circ \lesssim |\ell |\lesssim 30^\circ $, $|b|\lesssim 3^\circ $, where we have…

An inspection of the DSS and 2MASS images of selected Milky Way regions has led to the discovery of 66 stellar groupings whose morphologies, color-magnitude diagrams, and stellar density distributions suggest that these objects are possible…