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We present new statistical parallax solutions for the absolute magnitude and kinematics of RR Lyrae stars. New proper motion, radial velocity, and abundance data are used; the new data set is 50% larger, and of higher quality, than…
Recent results by Bensby and collaborators on the ages of microlensed stars in the Galactic bulge have challenged the picture of an exclusively old stellar population. However, these age estimates have not been independently confirmed. In…
We review the results on distances and absolute ages of galactic globular clusters (GCs) obtained after the release of the Hipparcos catalogue. Several methods for the Population II local distance scale are discussed, exploiting NEW RESULTS…
Recent works have challenged our canonical view of RR Lyrae (RRL) stars as tracers of exclusively old populations ($\gtrsim10$~Gyr) by proposing a fraction of these stars to be of intermediate ages ($\sim$2-5~Gyr). Since it is currently not…
High-quality Hipparcos data for a complete sample of nearly 12000 main-sequence and subgiant stars, together with Padua isochrones, are used to constrain the star-formation history of the solar neigbourhood and the processes that…
It has long been shown that the extreme ultraviolet spectrum of the ionizing stars of H II regions can be estimated by comparing the observed line emission to detailed models. In the Galactic Center (GC), however, previous observations have…
We combine Gaia data release 1 astrometry with Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) images taken some ~10-15 years earlier, to measure proper motions of stars in the halo of our Galaxy. The SDSS-Gaia proper motions have typical statistical…
Since thin disc stars are younger than thick disc stars on average, the thin disc is predicted by some models to start forming after the thick disc had formed, around 10 Gyr ago. Accordingly, no significant old thin disc population should…
The stellar halos of galaxies encode their accretion histories. In particular, the median metallicity of a halo is determined primarily by the mass of the most massive accreted object. We use hydrodynamical cosmological simulations from the…
The age difference between the two main globular cluster sub-populations in the Virgo giant elliptical galaxy, NGC 4472 (M 49), has been determined using HST WFPC2 images in the F555W and F814W filters. Accurate photometry has been obtained…
We present colour-magnitude diagrams (CMDs) for a sample of seven young massive clusters in the galaxies NGC 1313, NGC 1569, NGC 1705, NGC 5236 and NGC 7793. The clusters have ages in the range 5-50 million years and masses of 10^5 -10^6…
A search for stellar clusters has been carried out in 18 nearby spiral galaxies, using HST/WFPC2 archive images. All of the galaxies have previously been imaged from the ground in UBVI. A catalogue of structural parameters, photometry and…
We study the stellar content in the tidal tails of three nearby merging galaxies, NGC 520, NGC 2623, and NGC 3256, using BVI imaging taken with the Advanced Camera for Surveys on board the Hubble Space Telescope. The tidal tails in all…
Surface temperature distribution of horizontal-branch (HB) stars is very sensitive to age in old stellar systems, which makes it an attractive age indicator. In this paper, we present the recent revision of our model calculations for the HB…
We present results from a study of proto-globular cluster candidates in the interacting galaxy system Arp 284 (NGC 7714/5) using data from the Hubble Space Telescope. Previous studies of the Antennae and M51 have suggested that the majority…
Gaia DR2 provides unprecedented precision in measurements of the distance and kinematics of stars in the solar neighborhood. Through applying unsupervised machine learning on DR2's 5-dimensional dataset (3d position + 2d velocity), we…
The ages of the oldest stars in the Galaxy indicate when star formation began, and provide a minimum age for the Universe. Radioactive dating of meteoritic material and stars relies on comparing the present abundance ratios of radioactive…
The dominant systematic uncertainty in the age determination of galactic globular clusters is the depth of the convection envelope of the stars. This parameter is partially degenerate with metallicity which is in turn degenerate with age.…
We present a photometric study of star clusters in the nearby starburst galaxy M82 based on the UBVI, YJ and H band Hubble Space Telescope images. We find 1105 star clusters with V<23 mag. 1070 of them are located in the disk region, while…
After taking into account, for the first time, the detailed systematic variation of horizontal-branch (HB) morphology with age and metallicity, our population synthesis models show that the integrated H beta index is significantly affected…