Related papers: Clusters: age scales for stellar physics
Galactic nuclei and globular clusters act as laboratories in which nature experiments with normal stars, neutron stars and black holes, through collisions and through the formation of bound states, in the form of binaries. The main…
Stellar clusters are thought to be the simplest stellar systems and the closest observational counterparts to theoretical models for single stellar populations. Progress in our understanding of the atmospheres and evolution of massive stars…
It appears that the dynamical status of clusters and groups of galaxies is related to the large-scale structure of the Universe. A few interesting trends have been established: (1) The Cluster Substructure - Alignment Connection, by which…
I explore the current ability of both white dwarf cooling theory and main sequence stellar evolution theory to accurately determine stellar population ages by comparing ages derived using both techniques for open clusters ranging from 0.1…
We briefly review some constraints (Owing to the limited number of pages of present review, only a sub-sample of the topics discussed during the talk are briefly summarized. For the interested readers we are pleased to send them upon…
Recent surveys of star forming regions have shown that most stars, and probably all massive stars, are born in dense stellar clusters. The mechanism by which a molecular cloud fragments to form several hundred to thousands of individual…
Internal dynamical evolution can drive stellar systems into states of high central density. For many star clusters and galactic nuclei, the time scale on which this occurs is significantly less than the age of the universe. As a result,…
This paper addresses the questions of what we have learned about how and when dense star clusters form, and what studies of star clusters have revealed about galaxy formation and evolution. One important observation is that globular…
Some factors connecting the evolutionary histories of galaxies with the characteristics of their cluster systems are reviewed. Unanswered questions include: How is one to understand the observation that some globular cluster systems have…
There are three independent techniques for determining the age of the universe: via cosmochronology of long-lived radioactive nuclei, via stellar modelling and population synthesis of the oldest stellar populations, and via the precision…
The orbit distribution of young stars in the Galactic disk is highly structured, from well-defined clusters to streams of stars that may be widely dispersed across the sky, but are compact in orbital action-angle space. The age distribution…
We address the question how accurately stellar ages can be determined by stellar evolution theory. We select the star with the best observational material available - our Sun. We determine the solar age by fitting solar evolution models to…
Star clusters are found in all sorts of environments and their formation and evolution is inextricably linked to the star formation process. Their eventual destruction can result from a number of factors at different times, but the process…
Asteroseismology has become an indispensable method for measuring stellar ages and radii, while binary systems remain the most prevalent tool for determining stellar masses. The synergy of the two, namely pulsating stars in binary systems,…
Chemical clocks, based on age-sensitive stellar abundance ratios, offer a powerful and scalable approach to reconstruct the formation history of the Milky Way. This white paper outlines how wide-field, high-resolution spectroscopy can…
We review many of the basic properties of star cluster systems, and focus in particular on how they relate to their host galaxy properties and ambient environment. The cluster mass and luminosity functions are well approximated by…
Globular clusters (GCs) are among the oldest and most luminous stellar systems in the Universe, offering unique insights into galaxy formation and evolution. While the physical processes behind their origin have long remained elusive, major…
We study the relationship between the field star formation and cluster formation properties in a large sample of nearby dwarf galaxies. We use optical data from the Hubble Space Telescope and from ground-based telescopes to derive the ages…
We present an analysis of the positions and ages of young star clusters in eight local galaxies to investigate the connection between the age difference and separation of cluster pairs. We find that star clusters do not form uniformly but…
Galactic globular clusters are not simple stellar populations. And nothing is simple in their study, basically because we try to reconstruct chains of events that occurred at redshift z > 2-3 by observing these objects at z=0, after a…