Related papers: Do globular clusters time the Universe?
Various methods for age dating globular clusters in ellipticals are presented. We first present spectroscopy of individual globular clusters (feasible with the advent of the 10m-class telescopes), and the measurement of Balmer line indices.…
A significant fraction of stars in globular clusters (about 70%-85%) exhibit peculiar chemical patterns with strong abundance variations in light elements along with constant abundances in heavy elements. These abundance anomalies can be…
Based on an almost complete sample of Galactic open star clusters within 1.8 kpc, we perform a comprehensive statistical analysis of various cluster parameters like spatial position, age, size, mass and extinction in order to understand the…
Many dark energy models fail to pass the cosmic age test. In this paper, we investigate the cosmic age problem associated with nine extremely old Global Clusters (GCs) and the old quasar APM $08279+5255$ in the $R_h=ct$ Universe. The age…
The determination of the mean density of the Universe is a long standing problem of modern cosmology. The number density evolution of x-ray clusters at a fixed temperature is a powerful cosmological test, new in nature (Oukbir and…
Globular clusters (GCs) are the most ancient stellar systems in the Milky Way. Therefore, they play a key role in the understanding of the early chemical and dynamical evolution of our Galaxy. Around $40\%$ of them are placed within $\sim4$…
The properties of old globular cluster systems in galaxy halos are used to infer quantitative constraints on aspects of generic star (cluster) formation. First, the spatial distribution of globulars in three large galaxies, together with…
For two decades the hot big-bang model as been referred to as the standard cosmology -- and for good reason. For just as long cosmologists have known that there are fundamental questions that are not answered by the standard cosmology and…
The current expansion of the Universe has been observed to be accelerating, and the widely accepted spatially-flat concordance model of general relativistic cosmology attributes this phenomenon to a constant dark energy, a cosmological…
How much matter is there in the universe? Does the universe have the critical density needed to stop its expansion, or is the universe underweight and destined to expand forever? We show that several independent measures, especially those…
I discuss the Hubble parameter $H_0$, the age of the universe $t_0$, the density $\Omega_0$, and the cosmological constant $\Lambda$. To focus the discussion, I concentrate on the issue of the value of the density $\Omega_0$ in currently…
The apparent cosmological conflict between the age of the Universe, predicted in the standard Friedman cosmology by using the recent measurement of the larger Hubble constant from a direct calibration of the distance to the Virgo galaxy…
In this review, the status of measurements of the matter density (Omega), the vaccuum energy density or cosmological constant (Lambda), the Hubble constant (H0), and ages of the oldest measured objects (t0) are summarized. Measurements of…
A number of years ago the estimates of astronomers and astrophysicists were that the earliest galaxies took about 2.5 to 3 billion years to form, that is, that they did not appear until 2.5 to 3 billion years after the Big Bang. Those…
In this paper, time variable cosmological constant, dubbed {\it age cosmological constant}, is investigated motivated by the fact: any cosmological length scale and time scale can introduce a cosmological constant or vacuum energy density…
Recent developments relevant to the formation of globular cluster systems in galaxies are discussed, including (1) The age distribution of the oldest Milky Way clusters, (2) Subgroups and possible accretion and merger remnants in the…
In relativistic inhomogeneous cosmology, structure formation couples to average cosmological expansion. A conservative approach to modelling this assumes an Einstein--de Sitter model (EdS) at early times and extrapolates this forward in…
Recent improvements in astronomical observations lead to the conclusion that the Hubble constant lies between 60 and 80 Mpc km$^{-1}$ sec$^{-1}$ and the age of the universe between 11 and 14 Gigayears. Taken together with recent…
I review different methods devised to derive the age of the Galactic Disk, namely the Radio-active Decay (RD), the Cool White Dwarf Luminosity Function (CWDLF), old opne clusters (OOC) and the Color Magnitude Diagram (CMD) of the stars in…
Based on a new large, homogeneous photometric database of 35 Galactic globular clusters (GGCs), a set of distance and reddening independent relative age indicators has been measured. The observed D(V-I)_2.5 and D(V)(HB-TO) vs. metallicity…