Related papers: Ages and Age Spreads in Young Stellar Clusters
Ages are key to truly understand a large plethora of astrophysical phenomena. On the other hand, stellar clusters are open windows to understand stellar evolution, specifically, the change with time and mass of different stellar properties.…
Determining the sequence of events in the formation of stars and planetary systems and their time-scales is essential for understanding those processes, yet establishing ages is fundamentally difficult because we lack direct indicators. In…
This overview summarizes the age dating methods available for young sub-solar mass stars. Pre-main sequence age diagnostics include the Hertzsprung-Russell (HR) diagram, spectroscopic surface gravity indicators, and lithium depletion;…
In this contribution I will discuss fundamental stellar parameters as determined from young star clusters; specifically those with ages less than or approximately equal to that of the Pleiades. I will focus primarily on the use of stellar…
Pre-main sequence evolutionary theory is not well-calibrated to observations. With care, the observed quantities can be converted into effective temperature and luminosity (i.e. the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram) which the theoretical…
We provide a review of the current status of several topics on the ages, distances, and mass functions of open clusters, with a particular emphasis on illuminating the areas of uncertainty. Hipparcos has obtained parallaxes for nearby open…
Observations of Young Star Cluster ({\bf YSC}) systems in interacting galaxies are reviewed with particular emphasis on their Luminosity Functions ({\bf LF}) and colour distributions. A few spectroscopic abundance measurements are…
A luminosity spread at a given effective temperature is ubiquitously seen in the Hertzsprung-Russell (HR) diagrams of young star forming regions and often interpreted in terms of a prolonged period (>=10 Myr) of star formation. I review the…
We use the Geneva Syclist isochrone models that include the effects of stellar rotation to investigate the role that rotation has on the resulting colour-magnitude diagram (CMD) of young and intermediate age clusters. We find that if a…
Star clusters are ideal tracers of star formation activity in systems outside the volume that can be studied using individual, resolved stars. These unresolved clusters span orders of magnitude in brightness and mass, and their formation is…
The pace and pattern of star formation leading to rich young stellar clusters is quite uncertain. In this context, we analyze the spatial distribution of ages within 19 young (median t<3 Myr on the Siess et al. (2000) timescale),…
(ABRIDGED) We assess the systematic uncertainties in (young) cluster age, mass, and - to a lesser extent - extinction and metallicity determinations, based on broad-band imaging observations with the Hubble Space Telescope. Our aim here is…
Age is one of the most fundamental parameters of stars, yet it is one of the hardest to determine as it requires modelling various aspects of stellar formation and evolution. When we compare the ages derived from isochronal and dynamical…
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…
I summarize in terms of evolutionary population synthesis models our current understanding of stellar populations in different environments, from star clusters in nearby galaxies to distant galaxies in clusters or seen through gravitational…
The rich star clusters in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) are ideal for studying the process of star formation. Here we focus on the determination of age spreads amongst the massive stars in two young clusters, NGC1818 and NGC1805. We…
Rotation periods and projected equatorial velocities of pre-main-sequence (PMS) stars in star forming regions can be combined to give projected stellar radii. Assuming random axial orientation, a Monte-Carlo model is used to illustrate that…
We discuss the present state of knowledge and thought concerning the spread in age found among Galactic globular clusters, with some discussion of the implications for what happened during the earliest stages of the formation of the Milky…
This article reviews some recent studies of the mass, age, and space distributions of star clusters, with a primary focus on the large population of clusters in the interacting Antennae galaxies. Some of the highlights of these studies are…
The large majority of extragalactic star cluster studies done to date have essentially used two or three-passband aperture photometry, combined with theoretical stellar population synthesis models, to obtain age estimates. The accuracy to…