Related papers: Is the Galactic center populated with young star c…
The present-day globular cluster populations of galaxies reflect the cumulative effects of billions of years of galaxy evolution via such processes as mergers, tidal stripping, accretion, and in some cases the partial or even complete…
We probe the evolution of globular clusters that could form in giant molecular clouds within high-redshift galaxies. Numerical simulations demonstrate that the large and dense enough gas clouds assemble naturally in current hierarchical…
We have identified a previously unrecognized population of very compact, embedded low-mass Galactic stellar clusters. These tight (r$ \approx $0.14 pc) groupings appear as bright singular objects at the few arcsec resolution of the Spitzer…
The centre of our Galaxy is one of the most studied and yet enigmatic places in the Universe. At a distance of about 8 kpc from our Sun, the Galactic centre (GC) is the ideal environment to study the extreme processes that take place in the…
In this lecture we investigate the formation and evolution of black holes in star clusters. The star clusters under consideration are generally rich, containing more than 10^4 stars, and with a density exceeding 10^4 stars/pc^3. Among these…
The study of star cluster evolution necessitates modeling how their density profiles develop from their natal gas distribution. Observational evidence indicates that many star clusters follow a Plummer-like density profile. However, most…
Extremely rich populations of globular clusters, numbering ten thousand or more, surround the central giant galaxies in rich clusters. I discuss some recent spectroscopic and photometric observations of these rich globular clusters…
We use Cycle 21 Hubble Space Telescope (HST) observations and HST archival ACS Treasury observations of 30 Galactic Globular Clusters to characterize two distinct stellar populations. A sophisticated Bayesian technique is employed to…
At modest radii from the centre of galaxy clusters, individual galaxies may be infalling to the cluster for the first time, or have already visited the cluster core and are coming back out again. This latter population of galaxies is known…
Current observations of the Galactic Center (GC) seem to display a core-like distribution of bright stars from $\sim 5"$ inwards. On the other hand, we observe young, massive stars at the GC, with roughly 20-50\% of them in a disc, mostly…
The formation of stellar clusters dictates the pace at which galaxies evolve, and solving the question of their formation will undoubtedly lead to a better understanding of the Universe as a whole. While it is well known that star clusters…
Understanding the formation and evolution of young star clusters requires quantitative statistical measures of their structure. We investigate the structures of observed and modelled star-forming clusters. By considering the different…
We analyse the population of bright star clusters in the interacting galaxy pair NGC 4038/39 detected with HST WFPC1 by Whitmore & Schweizer (1995) using our spectrophotometric evolutionary synthesis models for various initial…
Nuclear star clusters are among the densest stellar systems known and are common in both early- and late-type galaxies. They exhibit scaling relations with their host galaxy which may be related to those of supermassive black holes. These…
Star cluster formation is a major mode of star formation in the extreme conditions of interacting galaxies and violent starbursts. Young clusters are observed to form in a variety of such galaxies, a substantial number resembling the…
Within the central parsec of the Galaxy, several tens of young stars orbiting a central supermassive black hole are observed. A subset of these stars forms a coherently rotating disc. Other observations reveal a massive molecular torus…
Galaxies in clusters are gas-deficient and a number of possible explanations for this observation have been advanced, including galaxy-cluster tidal interactions, galaxy harassment, and ISM-ICM gas stripping. In this paper, we use a…
Massive stars rapidly change their masses through strong stellar winds and mass transfer in binary systems. We show that such mass changes leave characteristic signatures in stellar mass functions of young star clusters which can be used to…
The Galactic center is the most active site of star formation in the Milky Way Galaxy, where particularly high-mass stars have formed very recently and are still forming today. However, since we are looking at the Galactic center through…
Young stars form on a wide range of scales, producing aggregates and clusters with various degrees of gravitational self-binding. The loose aggregates have a hierarchical structure in both space and time that resembles interstellar…