Related papers: A MODEST review
Continuous gravitational waves from rapidly rotating neutron stars are on the new frontiers of gravitational wave astrophysics and have strong connections to electromagnetic astronomy, nuclear astrophysics, and condensed matter physics. In…
The young star clusters we observe today are the building blocks of a new generation of stars and planets in our Galaxy and beyond. Despite their fundamental role we still lack knowledge about the conditions under which star clusters form…
The Hubble Space Telescope (HST) has proven to be uniquely suited for the measurement of proper motions (PMs) of stars and galaxies in the nearby Universe. Here we summarize the main results and ongoing studies of the HSTPROMO…
The "gravitational million-body problem," to model the dynamical evolution of a self-gravitating, collisional N-body system with ~10^6 particles over many relaxation times, remains a major challenge in computational astrophysics.…
We analyze the physical properties of stellar clusters that are detected in massive star-forming regions in the MYStIX project--a comparative, multiwavelength study of young stellar clusters within 3.6 kpc that contain at least one O-type…
Traditional studies of stellar clusters in external galaxies use surface photometry and therefore focus on systems that are still bright and compact enough to be separated from the stellar background. Consequently, the latter stages of…
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…
Magnetic fields are regarded as a crucial element for our understanding of stellar physics. They can be studied with a variety of methods which provide complementary - and sometimes contradictory - information about the structure, strength…
The next generation of multi-object spectrographs (MOS) will deliver comprehensive surveys of the Galaxy, Magellanic Clouds and nearby dwarfs. These will provide us with the vast samples, spanning the full extent of the Hertzsprung-Russell…
Stellar populations, building blocks of galaxies, are direct tracers of the star formation history, the chemical enrichment and the assembly of galaxies in the Universe. They therfore allow us to understand how galaxies formed and evolved.…
About 2 years ago, back in 2009, the first CoRoT Symposium was the occasion to present and discuss unprecedented data revealing the behaviour of stars at the micromagnitude level. Since then, the observations have been going on, the target…
The Nuclear Stellar Disk has been a highly active star-forming region in the Milky Way for approximately the last 30 million years. Despite hosting prominent clusters like Arches, Quintuplet, and Nuclear Stellar, their combined mass is less…
(abridged) This thesis presents theoretical and statistical techniques broadly related to systems of dynamically-interacting particles composed of several different types of populations. They are applied to observations of dense star…
The analysis of the spatial distribution and kinematics of galaxies in clusters allows one to determine the cluster internal dynamics. In this paper, I review the state of the art of this topic. In particular, I summarize what we have…
Dynamical evolution of stellar mass distribution in star clusters is analysed by considering simultaneously the effects of dynamical friction, stochastic heating and the gravitational potential due to mass distribution in the clusters. A…
Globular clusters (GCs), the oldest stellar systems observed in the Milky Way, have for long been considered single stellar populations. As such, they provided an ideal laboratory to understand stellar dynamics and primordial star formation…
Studies of stellar populations, understood to mean collections of stars with common spatial, kinematic, chemical, and/or age distributions, have been reinvigorated during the last decade by the advent of large-area sky surveys such as SDSS,…
The spatial and temporal relationships between stellar age, kinematics, and chemistry are a fundamental tool for uncovering the physics driving galaxy formation and evolution. Observationally, these trends are derived using carefully…
The long-term evolution of stellar orbits bound to a massive centre is studied in order to understand the cores of star clusters in central regions of galaxies. Stellar trajectories undergo tiny perturbation, the origin of which is twofold:…
We present new diagnostic metrics to probe the dynamical state of galaxy clusters. These novel metrics rely on the computation of the power spectra of the matter and gas distributions and their cross-correlation derived from cluster…