Related papers: Stellar clusters in the Gaia era
Open clusters (OCs) are popular tracers of the structure and evolutionary history of the Galactic disk. The OC population is often considered to be complete within 1.8 kpc of the Sun. The recent Gaia Data Release 2 (DR2) allows the latter…
I critically review a methodology of using clusters of galaxies as cosmological probes. The understanding of the abundances and spatial correlations of dark matter halos has been significantly advanced especially for a last few years.…
Star clusters stand at the intersection of much of modern astrophysics: the interstellar medium, gravitational dynamics, stellar evolution, and cosmology. Here we review observations and theoretical models for the formation, evolution, and…
Context: Planetary Nebula distance scales often suffer for model dependent solutions. Model independent trigonometric parallaxes have been rare. Space based trigonometric parallaxes are now available for a larger sample using the second…
The Gaia mission promises to deliver precision astrometry at an unprecedented level, heralding a new era for discerning the kinematic and spatial coordinates of stars in our Galaxy. Here, we present a new technique for estimating the age of…
The treatment of crowded fields in Gaia data will only be a reality in a few years from now. In particular, for globular clusters, only the end-of-mission data (public in 2022-2023) will have the necessary full crowding treatment and will…
We review the implications of the Gaia Data Release 2 catalogue for studying the dynamics of Milky Way globular clusters, focusing on two separate topics. The first one is the analysis of the full 6-dimensional phase-space distribution of…
Dynamical models of star clusters are maturing in the sense that effects other than simple point particle dynamics are taken into account. We summarize the relevance of and prospects for this new generation of N-body models.
Galaxy clusters are one of the important cosmological probes to test the consistency of the observable structure and evolution of our Universe with the predictions of specific cosmological models. We use results from our analysis of the…
An increasing number of photometric observations of multiple stellar populations in Galactic globular clusters is seriously challenging the paradigm of GCs hosting single, simple stellar populations. These multiple populations manifest…
The measurement of the positions, distances, motions and luminosities of stars represents the foundations of modern astronomical knowledge. Launched at the end of the eighties, the ESA Hipparcos satellite was the first space mission…
In spite of great progress over the last $\sim 10$ years, especially thanks to HST, a number of exciting open problem still puzzle astronomers working on globular clusters in our own and other galaxies. These problems range from determining…
The sheer number of pulsars discovered by the SKA, in combination with the exceptional timing precision it can provide, will revolutionize the field of pulsar astrophysics. The SKA will provide a complete census of pulsars in both the…
Membership of stars in open clusters is one of the most crucial parameters in studies of star clusters. Gaia opened a new window in the estimation of membership because of its unprecedented 6-D data. In the present study, we used published…
The Gaia-ESO Public Spectroscopic Survey is an ambitious project designed to obtain astrophysical parameters and elemental abundances for 100,000 stars, including large representative samples of the stellar populations in the Galaxy, and a…
Around the turn of the last century, star clusters of all kinds were considered "simple" stellar populations. Over the past decade, this situation has changed dramatically. At the same time, star clusters are among the brightest stellar…
Gaia will be ESA's milestone astrometric mission, and is due for launch at the end of 2013. Gaia will repeatedly map the whole sky measuring about one billion sources to V=20-22 mag. Its data products will be {\mu}as accuracy astrometry,…
White dwarfs (WDs) in open star clusters are a highly useful ensemble of stars. While numerous researchers use open cluster WDs to study the initial-final mass relation, numerous other evolutionary studies are also enabled by this sample of…
We discuss, from a statistical point of view, some leading issues that deal with the study of stellar populations in fully or partially unresolved aggregates, like globular clusters and distant galaxies. A confident assessment of the…
The Gaia-ESO survey (GES) is now in its fifth and last year of observations, and has already produced tens of thousands of high-quality spectra of stars in all Milky Way components. This paper presents the strategy behind the selection of…