Related papers: Do you know the extinction in your young massive c…
We report on the extinction properties in the fields around the clusters NGC 1854, NGC 1856, and NGC 1858 in the bar of the Large Magellanic Cloud. The colour-magnitude diagrams of the stars in all these regions show an elongated red giant…
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…
Intrigued by the extended red-giant clump (RC) stretching across the colour-magnitude diagram of the stars in a 50x50 pc^2 region of the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) containing the clusters NGC 1938 and NGC 1939, we have studied the stellar…
An overview of our current understanding of the formation and evolution of star clusters is given, with main emphasis on high-mass clusters. Clusters form deeply embedded within dense clouds of molecular gas. Left-over gas is cleared within…
We have investigated the interstellar reddening law of young open clusters within 3kpc from the Sun using optical, near-IR 2MASS, and Spitzer IRAC data. The total-to-selective extinction ratio Rv of 162 young open clusters (log t{age} <=…
Multicolor photometry from the Tycho-2 and 2MASS catalogues for 11 990 OB and 30 671 K-type red giant branch stars is used to detect systematic large-scale variations of the interstellar extinction law within the nearest kiloparsec. The…
Massive clusters in our Galaxy are an ideal testbed to investigate the properties and evolution of high mass stars. They provide statistically significant samples of massive stars of uniform ages. To accurately determine the intrinsic…
We present an optical analysis of 55 members of R136, the central cluster in the Tarantula Nebula of the Large Magellanic Cloud. Our sample was observed with STIS aboard the Hubble Space Telescope, is complete down to about 40\,$M_{\odot}$,…
By combining the photometric, spectroscopic, and astrometric information of the stars in the sightline of SNRs, the distances to and the extinctions of 32 Galactic supernova remnants (SNRs) are investigated. The stellar atmospheric…
We present a survey of 130 Galactic and extragalactic young massive clusters (YMCs, $10^4 < M/\msun < 10^8$, $10 < t/{\rm Myr} < 1000$) with integrated spectroscopy or resolved stellar photometry (40 presented here and 90 from the…
We have reanalyzed the Large Magellanic Cloud's (LMC) ultraviolet (UV) extinction using data from the IUE final archive. Our new analysis takes advantage of the improved signal--to--noise of the IUE NEWSIPS reduction, the exclusion of stars…
The Nuclear Bulge of the Milky Way harbors stellar populations that provide crucial insights into galaxy formation processes and serve as a nearby analog for understanding bulge formation in external galaxies. However, detailed studies of…
Using observations obtained with the Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) on board the Hubble Space Telescope (HST), we have studied the properties of the stellar populations in the central regions of 30 Dor, in the Large Magellanic Cloud. The…
Precise interstellar dust extinction laws are important to infer the intrinsic properties of reddened objects and correctly interpret observations. In this work, we attempt to measure the optical--infrared extinction laws of the Large and…
The extinction law and the variation of colour excess with position, luminosity as well as spectral class in young open star clusters NGC 663, NGC869, NGC 884, NGC 1502, NGC 1893, NGC 2244, NGC 2264, NGC 6611, Tr 14, Tr 15,Tr 16, Coll 228,…
The Magellanic Clouds host a large population of massive (> 10^4 Msun) star clusters with ages ranging from a few Myr to 12 Gyr. In nearly all cases, close inspection of their CMDs reveals features that deviate from expectations of a…
We present an extinction map of the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), using 204,502 stars from the Two Micron All Sky Survey point source catalog. We first use the NICE method to determine the reddening distribution, \ehk and \ejh, which we…
We have started an ambitious program to determine if the full diversity of extinction laws is real or if some of it is due to calibration or methodological issues. Here we start by analyzing the information on NIR extinction in a 2MASS…
Using the Spitzer IRAC camera we have obtained mid-IR photometry of the red giant branch stars in the Galactic globular cluster 47 Tuc. About 100 stars show an excess of mid-infrared light above that expected from their photospheric…
Extinction maps are essential for tracing interstellar dust and enabling accurate stellar population studies in galaxies. Here, a high-resolution extinction distribution of nearby galaxy M33 is constructed by fitting multiband color indexes…