Related papers: Towards an unbiased stellar census in open cluster…
Open clusters, which have age, abundance, and extinction information from studies of main-sequence turn off stars, are the ideal location in which to determine the mass-luminosity-radius relation for low-mass stars. We have undertaken a…
Current catalogues of open clusters are rather heterogeneous and incomplete lists of clusters than true catalogues. Before there has been no attempts of automatic search for open clusters in huge photometric catalogues using homogeneous…
Background: low-mass stars are the dominant product of the star formation process, and they trace star formation over the full range of environments, from isolated globules to clusters in the central molecular zone. In the past two decades,…
The main goal of our project is to obtain a complete picture of individual open clusters from homogeneous data and then search for correlations between their astrophysical parameters. The near-infrared JHKS photometric data from the…
In many evolutionary stages, low- and intermediate-mass stars show signs of mixing of the surface material with material from the interior. To account for all the details revealed by the observations it is necessary to include non-standard…
In this paper we present a novel method to identify and characterize stellar clusters deeply embedded in a dark molecular cloud. The method is based on measuring stellar surface density in wide-field infrared images using star counting…
We discuss, from a statistical point of view, some leading issues that deal with the study of stellar populations in fully or partially unresolved aggregates, like globular clusters and distant galaxies. A confident assessment of the…
We present an overview and statistical analysis of the data included in WEBDA. This database includes valuable information such as coordinates, rectangular positions, proper motions, photometric as well as spectroscopic data, radial and…
Weak gravitational lensing has been used extensively in the past decade to constrain the masses of galaxy clusters, and is the most promising observational technique for providing the mass calibration necessary for precision cosmology with…
Derived from first physical principles, a few simple rules are presented that can help in both the planning and interpretation of CCD and IR-array camera observations of resolvable stellar populations. These rules concern the overall size…
The fundamental properties of stellar clusters, such as the age or the total initial mass in stars, are often inferred from population synthesis models. The predicted properties are then used to constrain the physical mechanisms involved in…
(ABRIDGED) We assess the systematic uncertainties in (young) cluster age, mass, and - to a lesser extent - extinction and metallicity determinations, based on broad-band imaging observations with the Hubble Space Telescope. Our aim here is…
In this contribution we outline plans for identifying and characterising numerous young, low-mass stars within 150 pc of the Sun using the new SkyMapper telescope and Southern Sky Survey. We aim to learn more about the star formation…
We present this paper in conjuction with the following as the first results in the CFHT Open Star Cluster Survey. This survey is a large BVR imaging data set of 19 open star clusters in our Galaxy. This data set was taken with the CFH12K…
The existence of star-to-star light-element abundance variations in massive Galactic and extragalactic star clusters has fairly recently superseded the traditional paradigm of individual clusters hosting stars with the same age, and uniform…
I will show that photometry -- if extending over a reasonable choice of passbands -- can give fairly precise information about young star clusters and their evolutionary state. Optical colors alone are known to leave severe ambiguities due…
The apparent age and mass of a stellar cluster can be strongly affected by stochastic sampling of the stellar initial mass function, when inferred from the integrated color of low mass clusters (less than ~10^4 solar masses). We use…
We studied the principal parameters of some previously unstudied open star clusters using the JHK Near-IR photometry (2MASS survey). These clusters have been selected from the updated Catalogs of Dais and Webda. Based on the 2MASS database…
Context: The number of known strong gravitational lenses is expected to grow substantially in the next few years. The statistical combination of large samples of lenses has the potential of providing strong constraints on the inner…
The initial mass function (IMF) is an essential tool with which to study star formation processes. We have initiated the photometric survey of young open clusters in the Galaxy, from which the stellar IMFs are obtained in a homogeneous way.…