Related papers: Probabilities for Solar Siblings
An attempt is made, probably for the first time, to understand the origin of the solar system in context with the evolution of the galaxy as a natural consequence of the birth of several generations of stellar clusters. The galaxy is…
This paper considers the lithopanspermia hypothesis in star forming groups and clusters, where the chances of biological material spreading from one solar system to another is greatly enhanced (relative to the field) due to the close…
It is likely that all stars are born in clusters, but most clusters are not bound and disperse. None of the many protoclusters in our Galaxy are likely to develop into long-lived bound clusters. The Super Star Clusters (SSCs) seen in…
The Sun was born in a clustered environment with 10,000 other stars. Being an isolated star today, the Sun must have left the nest. We do not directly know when that happened, how violent the ejection was, or how far the Solar siblings have…
If we want to understand the evolution from star clusters to the Galactic field star population, the Solar neighbourhood is an ideal place to start. It contains objects from dense, very young clusters to old and almost dissolved moving…
The formation of globular clusters is still an unsolved problem. Though most scenarios assume a massive molecular cloud as the progenitor, it is unclear, how the cloud is transformed into a star cluster. Here a scheme of supernova (SN)…
The supermassive black hole candidate at the Galactic Center is surrounded by a parsec-scale star cluster, which contains a number of early type stars. The presence of such stars has been called a "paradox of youth" as star formation in the…
Young stars are mostly found in dense stellar environments, and even our own Solar system may have formed in a star cluster. Here, we numerically explore the evolution of planetary systems similar to our own Solar system in star clusters.…
Stars born at the same time in the same place should have formed from gas of the same element composition. But most stars subsequently disperse from their birth siblings, in orbit and orbital phase, becoming 'field stars'. Here we explore…
We present a global study of low mass, young stellar object (YSO) surface densities (Sigma) in nearby (< 500 pc) star forming regions based on a comprehensive collection of Spitzer Space Telescope surveys. We show that the distribution of…
Star formation in starbursts appears to be biased toward compact clusters, with up to 20% of all stars formed in them. Observations with HST show that many of these clusters have luminosities (-9 > Mv > -16), UBVI colors, and half-light…
We investigated the habitability of the Milky Way, making use of recent observational analysis on the prevalence of Earth-sized planets, in order to estimate where and when potentially habitable star systems may have formed over the course…
Stars formed in clusters can encounter other stars at close distances. In typical open clusters in the Solar neighbourhood containing hundreds or thousands of member stars, ten to twenty per cent of Solar-mass member stars are expected to…
Populations of young star clusters show significant differences even among "normal" disk galaxies. In this contribution I discuss how properties of young cluster systems are related to those of their host galaxies, based on a recent study…
The compositions of stars are a critical diagnostic tool for many topics in astronomy such as the evolution of our Galaxy, the formation of planets, and the uniqueness of the Sun. Previous spectroscopic measurements indicate a large…
Globular clusters (GCs) display much lower binary fractions than found among main-sequence stars in the solar neighborhood. The physical cause of this difference is debatable: does it reflect different star formation outcomes at low…
Most stars do not form in isolation but as part of a cluster comprising anywhere between a few dozen to several million stars with stellar densities ranging from 0.01 to several 10$^5$ \Msun pc$^{-3}$. The majority of these clusters…
We consider the possibility of cluster membership for 13 planetary nebulae that are located in close proximity to open clusters lying in their lines of sight. The short lifetimes and low sample size of intermediate-mass planetary nebulae…
Star clusters are formed in molecular clouds which are believed to be the birth places of most stars. From recent observational data, Lada & Lada 2003 estimated that only 4% to 7% of the clusters embedded inside molecular clouds have…
We show that an equal-mass, temporary binary companion to the Sun in the solar birth cluster at a separation of $\sim 10^3 \; \mathrm{\; AU}$ would have increased the likelihood of forming the observed population of outer Oort cloud objects…