Related papers: Field Stars, Open Clusters, and the Galactic Abund…
A set of 76 open clusters with abundances based upon DDO photometry and/or moderate dispersion spectroscopy has been transformed to a common [Fe/H] scale and used to study the local structure and evolution of the galactic disk. The…
The effect of atomic diffusion on the Main Sequence (MS) of metal-poor low mass stars is investigated. Since diffusion alters the stellar surface chemical abundances with respect to their initial values, one must ensure - by calibrating the…
Stars born at the same time in the same place should have formed from gas of the same element composition. But most stars subsequently disperse from their birth siblings, in orbit and orbital phase, becoming 'field stars'. Here we explore…
We establish a framework for determing absolute ages of Galactic globular clusters and then use these ages to investigate the age-metallicity and age-Galactocentric distance relations for the 36 clusters with the most reliable age data. The…
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…
The distribution of stellar abundances along the Galactic disk is an important constraint for models of chemical evolution and Galaxy formation. In this study we derive radial gradients of C, N, O, Mg, Al, Si, as well as S, from abundance…
Atomic diffusion in stars can create systematic trends of surface abundances with evolutionary stage. Globular clusters offer useful laboratories to put observational constraints on this theory as one needs to compare abundances in…
The Galactic disk retains a vast amount of information about how it came to be, and how it evolved over cosmic time. However, we know very little about the secular processes associated with disk evolution. One major uncertainty is the…
We present the analysis of the radial gradients of stellar absorption lines in a sample of 32 bulges of edge-on spiral galaxies, spanning nearly the full Hubble sequence (from S0 to Sc types), and a large range of velocity dispersion (from…
Recent work on abundance gradients have focussed not only on their magnitudes, but also on their spatial and temporal variations. In this work, we analyze the behaviour of radial abundance gradients in the galactic disk giving special…
A comparison is made between the age-metallicity relation obtained from four different types of studies: F and G stars in the Solar Neighbourhood, analysis of open clusters, galactic structure studies with the stellar population synthesis…
We present radial velocities and chemical abundances for nine stars in the old, distant open clusters Be 18, Be 21, Be 22, Be 32, and PWM 4. For Be 18 and PWM 4, these are the first chemical abundance measurements. Combining our data with…
We examine the impact of discrete numbers of stars in stellar populations on the results of Chemical Evolution Models. We explore the resulting dispersion in the true yields and their possible relation with the dispersion in observational…
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…
Recent dramatic improvements in the modeling of abundance evolution due to diffusion in A stars have been achieved with the help of monochromatic opacity tables from the OPAL group. An important result in the context of stellar pulsations…
We study the metallicity distribution and evolution in the Galactic disk based on the largest sample of open star clusters in the Galaxy. From the catalogue of 1879 open clusters in the range of Galactocentric distance (R_GC) from 4 to 20…
Open clusters offer a unique possibility to study the time evolution of the radial metallicity gradients of several elements in our Galaxy, because they span large intervals in age and Galactocentric distance, and both quantities can be…
It has recently been suggested that high-density clusters have stellar age distributions narrower than that of the Orion Nebula Cluster, indicating a possible trend of narrower age distributions for denser clusters. We show this effect to…
We examine the origin of clustercentric gradients in the star formation rates and colors of rich cluster galaxies within the context of a simple model where clusters are built through the ongoing accretion of field galaxies. The model…
Observations of globular clusters (GCs) and field stars in the halos of the giant elliptical galaxy Cen A and the spiral galaxy M31 show a large range of cluster-to-star number ratios ('specific frequencies'). The cluster-to-star ratio…