The exciting life of old stellar clusters

Séminaire IPAG de William Chantereau (Liverpool John Moore University), jeudi 19 septembre 2019 à 11h00, IPAG seminar room

Globular clusters are among the oldest and brightest structures in the Universe, and are therefore witnesses of processes from the early up to the present-day Universe. In turn, they play a major role in the benchmark for stellar evolution theory and they are used to constrain the assembly histories of galaxies.

Over the last decades, several pieces of ground-breaking observational evidence were accumulated pointing out the presence of multiple stellar populations with different chemical compositions in every individual globular cluster studied in detail so far.

I will review the effects of chemical features typical of these multiple populations on the evolution of stars, I will show their impact on the properties of their hosting cluster. I will also briefly discuss their effect at larger scales on external galaxies and finally introduce the need of hydrodynamical simulations to better constrain this multiple stellar populations phenomenon.