Related papers: The distance to the young open cluster Westerlund …
We present new spectroscopic and photometric observations of the young Galactic open cluster Westerlund 1 (Wd 1) that reveal a unique population of massive evolved stars. We identify ~200 cluster members and present spectroscopic…
Aims: This paper has two main objectives: (1) To determine the intrinsic properties of 16 faint and mostly unstudied open clusters in the poorly known sector of the Galaxy at 270$^\circ-$300$^\circ$, to probe the Milky Way structure in…
There is growing evidence that a treatment of binarity amongst OB stars is essential for a full theory of stellar evolution. However the binary properties of massive stars - frequency, mass ratio and orbital separation - are still poorly…
Results from gamma-ray observations by the H.E.S.S. telescope array in the direction of the young stellar cluster Westerlund 2 are presented. Stereoscopic imaging of Cherenkov light emission of gamma-ray induced showers in the atmosphere is…
Despite the first detection of X-rays from massive stars occurring four decades ago, the physical dependence of the emission mechanism(s) on the underlying stellar and binary properties of the emitters remains uncertain. The young massive…
Using the highest-resolution X-ray observation of the Trumpler 15 star cluster taken by the Chandra X-ray Observatory, we estimate the total size of its stellar population by comparing the X-ray luminosity function of the detected sources…
The typically large distances, extinction, and crowding of Galactic supermassive star clusters have so far hampered the identification of their very low mass members, required to extend our understanding of star and planet formation, and…
The open cluster IC 4996 in Cygnus and its vicinity are investigated by applying a two-dimensional photometric classification of stars measured in the Vilnius seven-color photometric system. Cluster members are identified by applying…
This investigation presents a photometric study of the Galactic structure toward the Carina arm tangent. The field is located between 280 deg and 286 deg galactic longitude and -4 deg to 4 deg galactic latitude. All currently available…
Context. Westerlund I is the richest young cluster currently known in our Galaxy, making it one of the most massive clusters for which we can resolve the individual stars even in the crowded centre. This makes it an ideal target to assess…
Analyzing the dynamical state of nearby young massive star clusters is essential understanding star cluster formation and evolution during their earliest stages. In this work we analyze the stellar and gas kinematics of the young massive…
We report the discovery of a hitherto undetected population of Wolf-Rayet stars in the young galactic open cluster Westerlund 1. Optical spectroscopy of the cluster identified 11 such objects; provisional classification suggests that 6 are…
We present the results of a high-resolution X-ray imaging study of the stellar population in the Galactic massive star-forming region RCW49 and its central OB association Westerlund 2. We obtained a 40 ks X-ray image of a 17'x17' field…
The detailed spiral structure in the outer Galactic disk is still poorly known, and for several Galactic directions we rely on model extrapolations. One of these regions is the fourth Galactic quadrant, in the sector comprised between Vela…
We report the discovery of a new Wolf-Rayet star in the direction of Cygnus. The star is strongly reddened but quite bright in the infrared, with J = 9.22, H = 8.08 and K = 7.09 (2MASS). On the basis of its H + K spectrum, we have…
We present deep near-infrared HST/WFC3 observations of the young supermassive Galactic star cluster Westerlund 1 and an adjacent control field. The depth of the data is sufficient to derive the mass function for the cluster as a function of…
We report on CCD optical (B and V passbands) and near IR (J and K bands) observations in the region of the old open cluster NGC 2141. By combining the two sets of photometry (500 stars in common) we derive new estimates of the cluster…
Stars in open clusters are powerful probes of the intervening Galactic magnetic field, via background starlight polarimetry, because they provide constraints on the magnetic field distances. We use 2MASS photometric data for a sample of 31…
We present $UBVRI$ photometry of 8702 stars in a $0.5 ^\circ\times0.5 ^\circ$ field in the direction of NGC 7142, taken with the Half Degree Imager (HDI) at the WIYN 0.9-meter telescope, to improve knowledge of this cluster's basic…
We report the results of our analysis of the publicly available data obtained by the Large Area Telescope (LAT) on board of the Fermi satellite towards the direction of the young massive star cluster Westerlund 2. We found significant…