Related papers: YMCA-1: a new remote star cluster of the Milky Way…
The infall of the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) into the Milky Way's halo impacts the distribution of stars and dark matter in our Galaxy. Mapping the observational consequences of this encounter can inform us about the properties of both…
The YMCA (Yes, Magellanic Clouds Again) and STEP ({The SMC in Time: Evolution of a Prototype interacting late-type dwarf galaxy) projects are deep g,i photometric surveys carried out with the VLT Survey Telescope (VST) and devoted to study…
Context: Recent near-infrared data have contributed to the discovery of new (obscured) massive stellar clusters and massive stellar populations in previously known clusters in our Galaxy. These discoveries lead us to view the Milky Way as…
The Magellanic System represents one of the best places to study the formation and evolution of galaxies. Photometric surveys of various depths, areas and wavelengths have had a significant impact on our understanding of the system;…
The Large Magellanic Cloud is the most massive satellite galaxy of the Milky Way, with an estimated mass exceeding a tenth of the mass of the Milky Way. Just past its closest approach of about 50 kpc, and flying by the Milky Way at an…
We studied the spatial distribution of young and old stellar populations along the western half part of the minor axis of the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) using Washington MT1 photometry of selected fields, which span a deprojected distance…
The outer northeastern region of the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC) is populated by a shell-like overdensity whose nature was recently investigated. We analyzed twenty catalogued star clusters projected onto it from Survey of the MAgellanic…
A detailed description is given of the data analysis leading to the discovery of young massive star clusters (YMCs) in a sample of 21 nearby galaxies. A new useful tool, ishape, for the derivation of intrinsic shape parameters of compact…
We have identified a few thousand star clusters in the nearby, late-type spiral galaxy M101, including approximately 90 candidate ancient globular clusters (GCs), from multi-band Hubble Space Telescope (HST) images. We obtained follow-up…
Nearly 500 cluster candidates have been reported by searches based on the new all-sky near infrared surveys. The true nature of the majority of these objects is still unknown. This project aims to estimate the physical parameters of some of…
We present the results of a systematic Milky Way satellite search performed across an array of publicly available wide-area photometric surveys. Our aim is to complement previous searches by widening the parameter space covered.…
We have introduced a semi-automated quantitative method to estimate the age and reddening of 1072 star clusters in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) using the Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment (OGLE) III survey data. This study brings…
We summarize our comprehensive gas surveys of some of the most luminous, deeply embedded (optically obscured) star formation regions in the Milky Way, which are the local cases of massive star clusters and/or associations in the making. Our…
An inspection of the DSS and 2MASS images of selected Milky Way regions has led to the discovery of 66 stellar groupings whose morphologies, color-magnitude diagrams, and stellar density distributions suggest that these objects are possible…
The Large and Small Magellanic Clouds (LMC and SMC) are the Milky Way's nearest interacting galaxy pair, offering a unique laboratory for studying tidal effects on galactic disks. Despite extensive survey efforts, the three-dimensional…
Observations indicate that present-day star formation in the Milky Way disk takes place in stellar ensembles or clusters rather than in isolation. Bound, long lived stellar groups are known as open clusters. They gradually lose stars and in…
We present the discovery of new star clusters in the central plane region ($|l|<30\deg$ and $|b|<6\deg$) of the Milky Way. In order to overcome the extinction problem and the spatial limit of previous surveys, we use the Wide-field Infrared…
VISTA observed the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC), as part of the VISTA survey of the Magellanic Clouds system (VMC), for six years (2010-2016). The acquired multi-epoch YJKs images have allowed us to probe the stellar populations to an…
Recent wide-area surveys have enabled us to study the Milky Way with unprecedented detail. Its inner regions, hidden behind dust and gas, have been partially unveiled with the arrival of near-IR photometric and spectroscopic datasets. Among…
We present a new formation scenario for NGC2419, which is one of the most luminous,one of the most distant, and as well one of the most extended globular clusters of the Milky Way. We propose that NGC2419 is the remnant of a merged star…