Related papers: A baseline on the relation between chemical patter…
Context: Current exoplanet formation studies tend to overlook the birth environment of stars in clustered environments. The effect of this environment on the planet-formation process, however, is important, especially in the earliest stage.…
Open clusters have long been used as tracers of Galactic structure. However, without a selection function to describe the completeness of the cluster census, it is difficult to quantitatively interpret their distribution. We create a method…
The chemical abundances of metal-poor stars provide a great deal of information regarding the individual nucleosynthetic processes that created the observed elements and the overall process of chemical enrichment of the galaxy since the…
Recent studies have started to cast doubt on the assumption that most stars are formed in clusters. Observational studies of field stars and star cluster systems in nearby galaxies can lead to better constraints on the fraction of stars…
Some of the most massive globular clusters of our Milky Way, such as for example omega-Centauri, show a mixture of stellar populations spanning a few Gyr in age and 1.5 dex in metallicities. In contrast, standard formation scenarios predict…
The majority of the inhomogeneities in the chemical composition of Globular Cluster (GC) stars appear due to primordial enrichment by hot-CNO cycled material processed in stars belonging to a first stellar generation. Either massive AGB…
The degree of influence that environment and mass have on the stellar populations of early-type galaxies is uncertain. In this paper we present the results of a spectroscopic analysis of the stellar populations of early-type galaxies aimed…
The pre-main-sequence evolution of the chemically peculiar (CP) stars on the upper main sequence is still a vast mystery and not well understood. Our analysis of young associations and open clusters aims to find (very) young CP stars to try…
Open clusters (OCs) are infrequent survivors of embedded clusters gestated in molecular clouds. Up to now, little is known about the initial conditions for the formation of OCs. Here, we studied this issue using high-precision astrometric…
It is generally assumed that a large fraction of stars are initially born in clusters. However, a large fraction of these disrupt on short timescales and the stars end up belonging to the field. Understanding this process is of paramount…
The fundamental properties of stellar clusters, such as the age or the total initial mass in stars, are often inferred from population synthesis models. The predicted properties are then used to constrain the physical mechanisms involved in…
If we are to develop a comprehensive and predictive theory of galaxy formation and evolution, it is essential that we obtain an accurate assessment of how and when galaxies assemble their stellar populations, and how this assembly varies…
Star clusters are interesting laboratories to study star formation, single and binary stellar evolution, and stellar dynamics. We have used the exquisite data from $Gaia$'s data release 3 (DR3) to study 21 relatively rich and nearby open…
We explore the mass-assembly and chemical enrichment histories of star forming galaxies by applying a population synthesis method to a sample of 84828 galaxies from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey Data Release 5. Our method decomposes the…
(ABBREVIATED:) 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, mass and…
Stellar ages are key for determining the formation history of the Milky Way, but are difficult to measure precisely. Furthermore, methods that use chemical abundances to infer ages may entangle the intrinsic evolution of stars with the…
We present unified chemical and spectrophotometric evolutionary synthesis models that allow to describe composite stellar populations in a chemically consistent way. Keeping track of the ISM abundance at birth of each star and using sets of…
Populations of young star clusters show significant differences even among "normal" disk galaxies. In this contribution I discuss how properties of young cluster systems are related to those of their host galaxies, based on a recent study…
(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…
Star clusters are crucial for understanding how stars evolve. Their colour-magnitude diagrams show the effects of stellar evolution of approximately coeval objects with the same chemical composition. Furthermore, the determination of their…