Related papers: Nuclear Star Clusters - Structure and Stellar Popu…
Dynamical evolution plays a key role in shaping the current properties of star clusters and star cluster systems. A detailed understanding of the effects of evolutionary processes is essential to be able to disentangle the properties which…
(Abridged) We present a study of the optical spectra of a sample of eight star-forming nuclear rings and the nuclei of their host galaxies. The spectra were obtained with the ISIS spectrograph on the William Herschel Telescope and cover a…
Extreme star formation includes star formation in starbursts and regions forming super star clusters. We survey the current problems in our understanding of the star formation process in starbursts and super star clusters - initial mass…
An increasing number of photometric observations of multiple stellar populations in Galactic globular clusters is seriously challenging the paradigm of GCs hosting single, simple stellar populations. These multiple populations manifest…
In this invited contribution I review the justifications for the attempts, currently very popular, to include in semi-analytic models of galaxy formation prescriptions to describe the mutual link between the star formation and nuclear…
Clusters of galaxies, being dark matter dominated, have long been and still are the ideal cosmological targets to study the nature of dark matter. Constraints on the nature of dark matter comes in particular from the observational…
A review of properties of matter in the interior of neutron stars is given. Particular attention is paid to recent many-body theory calculations of the properties of dense matter. Among topics discussed are the strong increase of tensor…
The interpretation of the difference observed between the radial distribution of globular clusters and that of halo-bulge stars in elliptical galaxies is discussed in terms of evolution of their globular cluster systems. I present a short…
Nuclear Star Clusters (NSCs) are dense clusters of stars that reside in the centers of a majority of the galaxies. In this paper, we study the density profiles for 29 galaxies in a volume-limited survey within 10 Mpc to characterize their…
Globular star clusters are extremely important astrophysical objects since (1) they are prime laboratories for testing stellar evolution; (2) they are ``fossils'' from the epoch of galaxy formation, and thus important cosmological tools;…
This paper is aimed at emphasizing some of the main hints, constraints and difficulties we currently have in trying to understand how globular clusters formed, along with their multiple stellar generations, an issue that must be regarded as…
We summarize some recent results from our observational campaign to study the central regions of spiral galaxies of late Hubble type (Scd - Sm). These disk-dominated, bulgeless galaxies have an apparently uneventful merger history. The…
This review summarises the main properties of Young Massive Clusters (YMCs), including their population properties, particularly focusing on extragalactic cluster samples. We discuss potential biases and caveats that can affect the…
We investigate the internal structure of clusters of galaxies in high-resolution N-body simulations of 4 different cosmologies. There is a higher proportion of disordered clusters in critical-density than in low-density universes, although…
A sample of hundreds of simulated galaxy clusters is used to study the statistical properties of galaxy cluster formation. Individual assembly histories are discussed, the degree of virialization is demonstrated and various commonly used…
(Abridged) As part of an ongoing effort to study the stellar nuclei of very late-type, bulge-less spirals, we present results from a high-resolution spectroscopic survey of nine such nuclear star clusters, undertaken with VLT/UVES. We fit…
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…
Globular clusters (GCs) constitute a system which is evolving because of various interactions with the galactic environment. Evolution may be the explanation of many observed features of Globular Cluster Systems (GCSs); the different radial…
Using the APM cluster data we investigate whether the dynamical status of clusters is related to the large-scale structure of the Universe. We find that cluster substructure is strongly correlated with the tendency of clusters to be aligned…
Using our recently improved understanding of star cluster physics, we are now within reach of answering a number of fundamental questions in contemporary astrophysics. Star cluster physics has immediate bearing on questions ranging from the…