Related papers: What is a globular cluster? An observational persp…
The discovery of young globular clusters in merging galaxies and other environments provides an opportunity to study directly the process of globular cluster formation. Empirically it appears that globular cluster formation occurs…
Understanding the formation of globular clusters will help us to constrain the evolutionary history of galaxies. For mergers on-going today, it appears that the number of newly created proto-globulars varies with the progenitor types and…
Rich clusters of galaxies, the largest virialized systems known, provide a powerful tool for the study of cosmology. Some of the fundamental questions that can be addressed with clusters of galaxies include: how did galaxies and large-scale…
We present an end-to-end description of the formation process of globular clusters (GCs) which combines a treatment for their formation and dynamical evolution within galaxy haloes with a state-of-the-art semi-analytic simulation of galaxy…
Young massive clusters are dense aggregates of young stars that form the fundamental building blocks of galaxies. Several examples exist in the Milky Way Galaxy and the Local Group, but they are particularly abundant in starburst and…
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…
I summarize the results of 15 years of research on the surface abundances of stars in globular clusters. Globular-cluster stars afford a unique view of the physical processes that shape the surface abundances of stars on and beyond the…
Globular cluster systems provide valuable fossil records of the formation history of their parent galaxies. This review specifically concentrates on using color distributions of the globular cluster systems of elliptical galaxies to…
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…
We review spectroscopic results concerning multiple stellar populations in globularclusters. The cluster initial mass is the most important parameter determining the fraction of second generation stars. The threshold for the onset 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…
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…
The formation of massive stellar clusters in turbulent molecular clouds is investigated. We include artificial star formation and energy feedback of newly born stars. The obtained systems are not likely to survive. Case studies to determine…
Star clusters - open and globulars - experience dynamical evolution on time scales shorter than their age. Consequently, open and globular clusters provide us with unique dynamical laboratories for learning about two-body relaxation, mass…
The infall and merger scenario of massive clusters in the Milky Way's potential well, as one of the Milky Way formation mechanisms, is reexamined to understand how the stars of the merging clusters are redistributed during and after the…
The most successful cosmological models to date envision structure formation as a hierarchical process in which gravity is constantly drawing lumps of matter together to form increasingly larger structures. Clusters of galaxies currently…
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…
I review the characteristics of cluster populations in other galaxies, with particular emphasis on young star clusters and a comparison with the (known) open cluster population of the Milky Way. Young globular cluster-like (compact,…
This paper is aimed at emphasizing some of the main hints, constraints and difficulties we currently have in trying to understand how globular clusters formed, along with their multiple stellar generations, an issue that must be regarded as…
We test the hypothesis that metal-poor globular clusters form within disk galaxies at redshifts z>3. Numerical simulations demonstrate that giant gas clouds, which are cold and dense enough to produce massive star clusters, assemble…