Related papers: Nuclear Star Clusters and Bulges
Most stars are born in rich young stellar clusters (YSCs) embedded in giant molecular clouds. The most massive stars live out their short lives there, profoundly influencing their natal environments by ionizing HII regions, inflating…
Stars and star clusters form by gravoturbulent fragmentation of interstellar gas clouds. The supersonic turbulence ubiquitously observed in Galactic molecular gas generates strong density fluctuations with gravity taking over in the densest…
We investigate a scenario where the formation of Globular Clusters (GCs) is triggered by high-speed collisions between infalling atomic-cooling subhalos during the assembly of the main galaxy host, a special dynamical mode of star formation…
Massive stars blow powerful winds and eventually explode as supernovae. By doing so, they inject energy and momentum in the circumstellar medium, which is pushed away from the star and piles up to form a dense and expanding shell of gas.…
The formation of massive stellar clusters in turbulent molecular clouds is investigated. We include artificial star formation and energy feedback of newly born stars. The obtained systems are not likely to survive. Case studies to determine…
How starburst clusters form out of molecular clouds is still an open question. In this article, I highlight some of the key constraints in this regard, that one can get from the dynamical evolutionary properties of dense stellar systems. I…
The formation of stellar clusters dictates the pace at which galaxies evolve, and solving the question of their formation will undoubtedly lead to a better understanding of the Universe as a whole. While it is well known that star clusters…
The currently available empirical evidence on the star formation processes in the extreme, high-pressure environments induced by galaxy encounters, mostly based on high-resolution Hubble Space Telescope imaging observations, strongly…
We argue that rich star clusters take at least several local dynamical times to form, and so are quasi-equilibrium structures during their assembly. Observations supporting this conclusion include morphologies of star-forming clumps,…
Observations have revealed that most stars are born in clusters. These systems, containing from tens to thousands of stars and typically significant mass in gas in the youngest systems, evolve due to a combination of stellar and star-gas…
We present parsec-scale kinematics of eleven nearby galactic nuclei, derived from adaptive-optics assisted integral-field spectroscopy at (near-infrared) CO band-head wavelengths. We focus our analysis on the balance between ordered…
Rich clusters of galaxies are the most massive virialized systems known. Even though they contain only a small fraction of all galaxies, rich clusters provide a powerful tool for the study of galaxy formation, dark matter, large-scale…
We find 9 nuclear cluster candidates in a sample of 14 edge-on, late-type galaxies observed with HST/ACS. These clusters have magnitudes (M_I ~ -11) and sizes (r_eff ~ 3pc) similar to those found in previous studies of face-on, late-type…
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…
Most stars form in dense star clusters deeply embedded in residual gas. These objects must therefore be seen as the fundamental building blocks of galaxies. With this contribution some physical processes that act in the very early and also…
Black holes and neutron stars present extreme forms of matter that cannot be created as such in a laboratory on Earth. Instead, we have to observe and analyze the experiments that are ongoing in the Universe. The most telling observations…
This review focuses on how galaxies and their globular cluster systems form. I first discuss the now fairly convincing evidence that some globular clusters form in galaxy starbursts/mergers. One way these observations are valuable is they…
The concept that stars form in the modern era began some 60 years ago with the key observation of expanding OB associations. Now we see that these associations are an intermediate scale in a cascade of hierarchical structures that begins on…
We investigate the formation and early evolution of star clusters assuming that they form from a turbulent starless clump of given mass bounded inside a parent self-gravitating molecular cloud characterized by a particular mass surface…
We investigate the structural properties of nuclear star clusters in late-type spiral galaxies. More specifically, we fit analytical models to HST images of 39 nuclear clusters in order to determine their effective radii after correction…