Related papers: Co-moving groups around massive stars in the Nucle…
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…
We present new proper motions from the 10 m Keck telescopes for a puzzling population of massive, young stars located within 3.5" (0.14 pc) of the supermassive black hole at the Galactic Center. Our proper motion measurements have…
We present the results of a large-scale proper motion study of the central ~36'x16' of the Milky Way, based on our high angular resolution GALACTICNUCLEUS survey (epoch 2015) combined with the HST Paschen-alpha survey (epoch 2008). Our…
Galactic nuclei often harbor a disproportionately large amount of star formation activity with respect to their surrounding disks. Not coincidentally, the density of molecular material in galactic nuclei is often also much greater than that…
Proper motion studies of stars in the centre of the Milky Way have been typically limited to the Arches and Quintuplet clusters and to the central parsec. Here, we present the first results of a large-scale proper motion study of stars…
Many galaxies host pronounced circumnuclear starbursts, fuelled by infalling gas. Such activity is expected to drive the secular evolution of the nucleus and generate super winds, while the intense radiation fields and extreme gas and…
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…
Nuclear star clusters (NSCs) are the densest stellar systems in the Universe. They can be found at the center of all galaxy types, but tend to favor galaxies of intermediate stellar mass around 10$^9\,$M$_{\odot}$[1, 2]. Currently, two main…
A large fraction of bulgeless disk galaxies contain young compact stellar systems at their centers, in spite of the local gravitational stability of these disks. We evaluate two contrasting hypotheses for the origin of the nuclear star…
It is challenging to reliably identify stars that were born together outside of actively star-forming regions and bound stellar systems. However, co-natal stars should be present throughout the Galaxy, and their demographics can shed light…
The Galactic centre hosts a crowded, dense nuclear star cluster with a half-light radius of 4 pc. Most of the stars in the Galactic centre are cool late-type stars, but there are also >100 hot early-type stars in the central parsec of the…
We investigate the distribution of bright main sequence stars near the northern edge of the M33 disk. Clustering on sub-kpc scales is seen among stars with ages near 10 Myr, and two large star-forming complexes are identified. Similar…
Stars are most likely to merge or collide in regions of the highest stellar densities, and our own Galactic Center contains many stars packed into a relatively small volume -- even the ambient stellar number density in the central 50 pc is…
Recent observations have revealed a variety of young star clusters, including embedded systems, young massive clusters, and associations. We study the formation and dynamical evolution of these clusters using a combination of simulations…
It is often assumed that the strong gravitational field of a super-massive black hole disrupts an adjacent molecular cloud preventing classical star formation in the deep potential well of the black hole. Yet, young stars have been observed…
We discuss the structural change and degree of mass segregation of young dense star clusters within about 100pc of the Galactic center. In our calculations, which are performed with GRAPE-6, the equations of motion of all stars and binaries…
We study the evolution and observability of young, compact star clusters near the Galactic center, such as the Arches and Quintuplet systems. The clusters are modeled by integrating the equations of motion of all stars while accounting for…
In young star clusters, the density can be high enough and the velocity dispersion low enough for stars to collide and merge with a significant probability. This has been suggested as a possible way to build up the high-mass portion of the…
The innermost regions of most galaxies are characterised by the presence of extremely dense nuclear star clusters. Nevertheless, these clusters are not the only stellar component present in galactic nuclei, where larger stellar structures…
Nearby dwarf irregular galaxies were searched for compact star clusters using data from the HST archives. Three of the galaxies were found to host both populous clusters (M_V<-9.5 at a fiducial age of 10 Myr) and super-star clusters…