Related papers: Star clusters: Anything but simple
The knowledge of stellar ages directly impacts the characterization of a planetary system as it puts strong constraints on the moment when the system was born. Unfortunately, the determination of precise stellar ages is a very difficult…
Star clusters provide an excellent opportunity to study the role of environment on determining the frequencies of short period planets. They provide a large sample of stars which can be imaged simultaneously, with a common distance, age and…
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…
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…
High precision photometry and spectroscopy of low-mass stars reveal a variety of properties standard stellar evolution cannot predict. Rotation, an essential ingredient of stellar evolution, is a step towards resolving the discrepancy…
Galactic globular clusters, which are ancient building blocks of our Galaxy, represent a very interesting family of stellar systems in which some fundamental dynamical processes have taken place on time scales shorter than the age of the…
We review recent work that investigates the formation of stellar clusters, ranging in scale from globular clusters through open clusters to the small scale aggregates of stars observed in T associations. In all cases, recent advances in…
Thousands of confirmed and candidate exoplanets have been identified in recent years. Consequently, theoretical research on the formation and dynamical evolution of planetary systems has seen a boost, and the processes of planet-planet…
It is argued that apart from the well known dependence of the Am phenomenon on the mass, age (effective temperature, gravity) and rotation there is also a complex dependence on the orbital parameters in binary systems. This is why the…
Massive clusters are now seen to form easily in interacting and merging galaxies, making these excellent environments for studying the properties of young clusters. New observations of the Antennae (NGC 4038/39) show that the most luminous…
High precision photometry and spectroscopy of low-mass stars reveal a variety of properties standard stellar evolution cannot predict. Rotation, an essential ingredient of stellar evolution, is a step towards resolving the discrepancy…
Classical Cepheid variable stars are both sensitive astrophysical laboratories and accurate cosmic distance tracers. We have recently investigated how the evolutionary effects of rotation impact the properties of these important stars and…
The Be star phenomenon is related to fast rotation, although the cause of this fast rotation is not yet clearly established. The basic effects of fast rotation on the stellar structure are reviewed: oblateness, mixing, anisotropic winds.…
I present recent observations and analyses of star cluster formation in a wide variety of environments -- from young star clusters and super star clusters in normal actively star-forming spirals and irregulars to starbursting dwarfs and…
Analyzing global starburst properties in various kinds of starburst and post-starburst galaxies and relating them to the properties of the star cluster populations they form, I explore the conditions for the formation of massive, compact,…
Recent analyses of solar spectroscopic data (see Asplund, Grevesse & Sauval 2004 and references therein) suggest a significative variation of the heavy elements abundance. The change of heavy mixture might affect the determination of the…
In the first part of this article, we review observations of the mass and luminosity functions of young and old star cluster systems. We also review some of the physical processes that may determine the characteristic mass of globular…
Globular clusters are stellar dynamical systems which evolve on stellar evolutionary and both internal and external dynamical timescales. Quantitative comparison of cluster properties with realistic evolutionary dynamical models is becoming…
Typical globular clusters (GCs - young and old) host stellar populations with little or no star-to-star variations in heavy elements (e.g., Ca, Fe) nor in age. Nuclear star clusters (NSCs), on the other hand, host complex stellar…
Star clusters are observed to form in a highly compact state and with low star-formation efficiencies, and only 10 per cent of all clusters appear to survive to middle- and old-dynamical age. If the residual gas is expelled on a dynamical…