Related papers: The Gould Belt, star formation, and the local inte…
The discovery of young globular clusters in merging galaxies and other environments provides an opportunity to study directly the process of globular cluster formation. Empirically it appears that globular cluster formation occurs…
Mergers of gas-rich galaxies lead to gravitationally driven increases in gas pressure that can trigger intense bursts of star and cluster formation. Although star formation itself is clustered, most newborn stellar aggregates are unbound…
We present Log N -- Log S distribution for close-by young isolated neutron stars. On the basis of this distribution it is shown that the seven ROSAT isolated neutron stars (if they are young cooling objects) are genetically related to the…
The circumstellar medium around massive stars is strongly impacted by stellar winds, radiation, and explosions. We use numerical simulations of these interactions to constrain the current properties and evolutionary history of various stars…
The determination of the age of the bulge has led to two contradictory results. On the one side, the color-magnitude diagrams in different bulge fields seem to indicate a uniformly old ($>$10 Gyr) population. On the other side, individual…
Empirical star formation laws from the last 20 years are reviewed with a comparison to simulations. The current form in main galaxy disks has a linear relationship between the star formation rate per unit area and the molecular cloud mass…
MHD turbulence plays a central role in the physics of star-forming molecular clouds and the interstellar medium. I here show that MHD turbulence in molecular clouds must be driven to account for the observed supersonic motions in the…
We study the $\gamma$-ray emission properties of pulsars by using a new self-consistent outer gap model. The outer gap can exist in pulsars with age over million years old if the effect of magnetic inclination angle as well as the average…
Using JCMT Gould Belt Survey data from CO J=3-2 isotopologues, we present a meta-analysis of the outflows and energetics of star-forming regions in several Gould Belt clouds. The majority of the regions are strongly gravitationally bound.…
In the solar-neighbourhood, older stars have larger random velocities than younger ones. It is argued that the increase in velocity dispersion with time is predominantly a gradual process rather than one induced by discrete events such as…
The Milky Way's inner region is dominated by a stellar bar and a boxy-peanut shaped bulge. However, which stellar populations inhabit the inner Galaxy or how star formation proceeded there is still unknown. The difficulty in studying these…
The hot interstellar medium traces the stellar feedback and its role in regulating the eco-system of the Galaxy. I review recent progress in understanding the medium, based largely on X-ray absorption line spectroscopy, complemented by…
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…
Massive stars lose a large fraction of their original mass over the course of their evolution. These stellar winds shape the surrounding medium according to parameters that are the result of the characteristics of the stars, varying over…
The most recent observational evidence seems to indicate that giant molecular clouds are predominantly gravitationally unbound objects. In this paper we show that this is a natural consequence of a scenario in which cloud-cloud collisions…
The age of the Local Bubble (LB) constrains the timescale on which the interstellar medium in the solar neighborhood evolves. Previous estimates placed the age of the LB at \sim 14 Myr, and attributed its expansion to \sim 15-20 supernovae…
The age of globular clusters inferred from observations depends sensitively on assumptions such as the initial helium abundance and the mass loss rate. A high helium abundance (e.g., $Y\approx$0.28), as well as an inclusion of helium…
The evolution of star clusters is determined by several internal and external processes. Here we focus on two dominant internal effects, namely energy exchange between stars through close encounters (two-body relaxation) and mass-loss of…
Chemical abundances in the Leo ring, the largest HI cloud in the local Universe, have recently been determined to be close or above solar, incompatible with a previously claimed primordial origin of the ring. The gas, pre-enriched in a…
Based on high-latitude molecular clouds with highly accurate distance estimates taken from the literature, we have redetermined the parameters of their spatial orientation. This system can be approximated by a 350x235x140 pc ellipsoid…