Related papers: From nuclear clusters to halo globulars: Star clus…
The current generation of galaxy simulations can resolve individual giant molecular clouds, the progenitors of dense star clusters. But the evolutionary fate of these young massive clusters, and whether they can become the old globular…
We present a high-resolution simulation of globular cluster formation in a galaxy merger. For the first time in such a simulation, individual star clusters are directly identified and followed on their orbits. We quantitatively compare star…
Nearly a century after the true nature of galaxies as distant "island universes" was established, their origin and evolution remain great unsolved problems of modern astrophysics. One of the most promising ways to investigate galaxy…
HST is very well tailored for observations of extragalactic star clusters. One obvious reason is HST's high spatial resolution, but equally important is the wavelength range offered by the instruments on board HST, in particular the blue…
The numerous and massive young star clusters in blue compact galaxies (BCGs) are used to investigate the properties of their hosts. We test whether BCGs follow claimed relations between cluster populations and their hosts, such as the the…
Galaxies cover a wide range of masses and star formation histories. In this review, I summarize some of the evolutionary key features of common galaxy types. At the high-mass end, very rapid, efficient early star formation is observed,…
We review recent work that investigates the formation of stellar clusters, ranging in scale from globular clusters through open clusters to the small scale aggregates of stars observed in T associations. In all cases, recent advances in…
Most star complexes are in fact complexes of stars, clusters and gas clouds; term "star complexes" was introduced as general one disregarding the preferential content of a complex. Generally the high rate of star formation in a complex is…
Spiral galaxies offer a unique opportunity to study the role of star formation in galaxy evolution and to test various theoretical star formation schemes. I review some recent relevant work on the evolution of spiral galaxies. Detailed…
We present parsec-scale kinematics of eleven nearby galactic nuclei, derived from adaptive-optics assisted integral-field spectroscopy at (near-infrared) CO band-head wavelengths. We focus our analysis on the balance between ordered…
We summarise some recent results about nearby galactic bulges that are relevant to their formation. We highlight a number of significant advances in our understanding of the surface brightness profiles, stellar populations, and especially…
Observations and theory both suggest that star clusters form sub-virial (cool) with highly sub-structured distributions. We perform a large ensemble of N-body simulations of moderate-sized (N=1000) cool, fractal clusters to investigate…
Stars are often observed to form in clusters. It is therefore important to understand how such a region of concentrated mass is assembled out of the diffuse medium and its properties eventually prescribe the important physical mechanisms…
Globular clusters are often assumed to be good tracers of major star formation episodes in their host galaxies. While observations over the past 2 decades have confirmed the presence of young objects with globular cluster-like properties in…
Globular clusters (GCs), the oldest stellar systems observed in the Milky Way, have for long been considered single stellar populations. As such, they provided an ideal laboratory to understand stellar dynamics and primordial star formation…
How Very Young Massive star Clusters (VYMCs; also known as "starburst" clusters), which typically are of $\gtrsim 10^4M_\odot$ and are a few Myr old, form out of Giant Molecular Clouds is still largely an open question. Increasingly…
It is now commonly accepted that globular clusters (GCs) have undergone a complex formation and that they host at least two stellar generations. This is a recent paradigm and is founded on both photometric and spectroscopic evidence. We…
Star complexes are the highest level groupings in the hierarchy of the embedded young stars, clusters and associations, which obey the size - age relation. Starburst clumps, superassociations, supergiant HII regions are different titles for…
A major paradigm shift has recently revolutionized our picture of globular clusters (GC) that were long thought to be simple systems of coeval stars born out of homogeneous material. Indeed, detailed abundance studies of GC long-lived…
Star clusters are ideal tracers of star formation activity in systems outside the volume that can be studied using individual, resolved stars. These unresolved clusters span orders of magnitude in brightness and mass, and their formation is…