Stars form predominantly in groups which display a broad spectrum of masses, sizes, and other properties. Despite this diversity there exist an underlying structure that can constrain cluster formation theories. We show how combining observations with simulations allows us to disclose this underlying structure. One example is the mass-radius relation for young embedded associations which follows ${M_c} = CR_c^\gamma $ with γ = 1.7 ± 0.2.0.2, which is directly related to the mass-radius relation of clumps. Results based on GAIA DR2 have demonstrated that young stellar groups (1–5 Myr) expand and that this expansion process is largely over by an age of 10–20 Myr. Such a behaviour is expected within the gas expulsion scenario. However, the effect of gas expulsion depends strongly on the SFE, the gas expulsion time scale, etc. Here it is demonstrated how existing and upcoming data are able to constrain these parameters and correspondingly the underlying models.

We propose induction heating of planetary interiors as an energy source in the planetary mantles. Induction heating arises when a changing magnetic field induces currents in a conducting planetary mantle which then dissipate to heat the planet, mostly within an upper layer called the skin depth. This physical process can play a role in planetary interiors around strongly magnetized stars such as low mass M dwarfs with kG magnetic fields, which are common among these stars.

At the end of their evolution, asymptotic giant branch (AGB) stars undergo strong pulsation, mass loss, and dust production. Their mass loss results in substantial chemical and dust enrichment of the interstellar medium. Dust evolution models and isotope abundances in presolar grains suggest that AGB stars play a key role in both dust evolution and the star formation process. They are also the brightest stars in galaxies, potentially dominating in the near-infrared. As a result, AGB stars have a significant influence on the evolution and appearance of their host galaxies and thus must be accounted for when interpreting a galaxy’s integrated light. I will highlight new results that describe the impact AGB stars have on galaxies, including how AGB stars are used to probe galaxy evolution.

We analyse the chemical abundances of stars in the local group dwarf galaxies using the SAGA database. The inspection of the relationship between Eu and Ba abundances confirms an anomalously Ba-rich population in Fornax, which indicates a pre-enrichment of interstellar gas with r-process elements.

The question whether stellar bars are either transitory features or long-lived structures is still matter of debate. This problem is more acute for double-barred systems where even the formation of the inner bar remains a challenge for numerical studies. We present a thorough study of the central structures of the double-barred galaxy NGC 1291. We used a two-dimensional multi-component photometric decomposition performed on the 3.6 μm images from S4 G, combined with both stellar kinematics and stellar population analysis carried out using integral field data from the MUSE TIMER project. We report on the discovery of the first Box-Peanut (B/P) structure in an inner bar detected in the face-on galaxy NGC 1291. The B/P structure is detected as bi-symmetric minima of the h4 moment of the line-of-sight velocity distribution along the major axis of the inner bar, as expected from numerical simulations. Our observations demonstrate that inner bars (similarly as outer bars) can suffer buckling instabilities, thus suggesting they can survive a long time after bar formation. The analysis of the star formation history for the structural components shaping the central regions of NGC 1291 also constrains the epoch of dynamical assembly of the inner bar, which took place >6.5 Gyr ago for NGC 1291. Our results imply that the inner bar of NGC 1291 is a long-lived structure.

Octocam is an 8-channel VIS and NIR imager and spectrograph to be installed at Gemini South in 2022. It provides simultaneous imaging in g’,r’,i’,z,Y,J,H,KS bands or simultaneous spectroscopy at a resolution of ∼4000, together with high time-resolution options. Additional capabilities such as spectropolarimetry or an Integral Field Unit could be added as an upgrade later. These properties makes it very well suited as a follow-up instrument for transient searches. It is planned as a dedicated follow-up instrument for LSST, and will start operations at the same time as the LSST main survey. Octocam was conceived as a consortium consisting of South-West Research Institute in San Antonio, Texas, IAA-CSIC in Granada, FRACTAL SLNE in Madrid, and George Washington University.

Nitrogen is among the most abundant chemical elements in the cosmos, and asymptotic giant branch (AGB) stars are fundamental nucleosynthetic sources of N in galaxies. In this work, we show how the observed N/O versus O/H chemical abundance diagram, both in extragalactic systems and in our own Galaxy, can be used to constrain the nucleosynthetic origin of N in the cosmos. In particular, we review the results of our studies with chemical evolution models, embedded in full cosmological chemodynamical simulations.

Migration of dense gaseous clumps that form in young protostellar disks via gravitational fragmentation is investigated to determine the likelihood of giant-planet formation. We show that gaseous clumps that form in the outer regions of the disk (> 100 au) through disk fragmentation often migrate toward the central star on timescales from a few thousand to few tens of thousands of years. The tidal mass loss helps the clumps to significantly slow down or even halt their inward migration at a distance of a few tens of AU from the protostar.

We present surface photometry and stellar kinematics of NGC 4264, a lenticular galaxy in the region of the Virgo Cluster undergoing a tidal interaction with its neighbour, NGC 4261. We measured the bar radius and strength from SDSS imaging and the bar pattern speed from MUSE integral-field spectroscopy. We find that NGC 4264 hosts a strong and large bar, which is rotating fast. The accurate measurement of the bar rotation rate allows us to exclude that the formation of the bar was triggered by the ongoing interaction.

Magnetic fields play a significant role during star formation processes, hindering the fragmentation and the collapse of the parental cloud, and affecting the accretion mechanisms and feedback phenomena. However, several questions still need to be addressed to clarify the importance of magnetic fields at the onset of high-mass star formation, such as how strong they are and at what evolutionary stage and spatial scales their action becomes relevant. Furthermore, the magnetic field parameters are still poorly constrained especially at small scales, i.e. few astronomical units from the central object, where the accretion disc and the base of the outflow are located. Thus we need to probe magnetic fields at different scales, at different evolutionary steps and possibly with different tracers. We show that the magnetic field morphology around high-mass protostars can be successfully traced at different scales by observing maser and dust polarised emission. A confirmation that they are effective tools is indeed provided by our recent results from 6.7 GHz MERLIN observations of the massive protostar IRAS 18089-1732, where we find that the small-scale magnetic field probed by methanol masers is consistent with the large-scale magnetic field probed by dust (Dall’Olio et al. 2017 A&A 607, A111). Moreover we present results obtained from our ALMA Band 7 polarisation observations of G9.62+0.20, which is a massive star-forming region with a sequence of cores at different evolutionary stages (Dall’Olio et al. submitted to A&A). In this region we resolve several protostellar cores embedded in a bright and dusty filamentary structure. The magnetic field morphology and strength in different cores is related to the evolutionary sequence of the star formation process which is occurring across the filament.

Setting the formation of globular clusters (GCs) within a cosmological context and characterising the properties of proto-GCs at high redshift is currently a major challenge. In this work, we address that challenge by exploring a suit of high-resolution cosmological simulations from the First Billion Years (FiBY) project z at ⩾6 to investigate theoretical scenarios concerning the formation of old, low-mass stellar systems with a particular focus on GCs. Two distinct groups of objects are identified in the simulations. The first group of objects, with a high baryon fraction, we associate with proto-GCs. The second group, that exhibit a high stellar fraction, could be forming ultra-faint dwarf galaxies (UFDs). The objects with high baryon fraction are promising proto-GC candidates because they have little to no dark matter (DM), have number densities consistent with predictions from the literature, are very compact and have a high stellar density. We fit and also assess the redshift-zero globular system mass - halo mass relation and find it provides a reasonable fit to our proto-GC objects, indicating that this relation is likely set at formation.

Here we present some preliminary results of our analysis of the combined Chandra observations of the Pictor A radio galaxy. All the available Chandra data for the target, consisting of multiple pointings spanning over 15 years and amounting to the total exposure time of 464 ks, have been included in the analysis. We studied in detail the PSFs of the core region in the individual pointings, as well as the radial profile of the X-ray surface brightness of the source in the combined dataset, in order to discriminate between the radiative output of the unresolved core and the host galaxy. Based on these, we have performed spectral modeling of the active nucleus, constraining its variability.

Ultra-luminous X-ray sources (ULXs) are off-nuclear point sources in nearby galaxies with luminosities well exceeding the Eddington limit for stellar-mass objects. It has been recognized after the discovery of pulsating ULXs (PULXs) that a fraction of these sources could be accreting neutron stars in high-mass X-ray binaries (HMXBs) though the majority of ULXs are lacking in coherent pulsations. The earliest stage of some HMXBs may harbor rapidly rotating neutron stars propelling out the matter transferred by the massive companion. The spin-down power transferred by the neutron-star magnetosphere to the accretion disk at this stage can well exceed the Eddington luminosities and the system appears as a non-pulsating ULX. In this picture, PULXs appear as super-critical mass-accreting descendants of non-pulsating ULXs. We present this evolutionary scenario within a self-consistent model of magnetosphere-disk interaction and discuss the implications of our results on the spin and magnetic field of the neutron star.

The study of dwarf spheroidal galaxies (dSph) is of great importance to understand galaxy evolution at the low-mass end. In the Local Group the majority of them are found to be satellites of the Milky Way or M31. The closest ones have been studied in great detail, however it is hard to constrain if their present-day observed properties are mainly caused by internal or environmental mechanisms. In order to minimize these effects and gain an insight into their intrinsic properties, we are studying two of the three isolated dSph galaxies in the Local Group, i.e. Cetus and Tucana, located far beyond the virial radius of the Milky Way and M31. We present here results from our recently published analysis of Cetus (Taibi2018) and preliminary results for Tucana (Taibi et al. in prep.).

We review the Schwarzschild orbit-superposition approach and present a new implementation of this method, which can deal with a large class of systems, including rotating barred disk galaxies. We discuss two conceptual problems in this field: the intrinsic degeneracy of determining the potential from line-of-sight kinematics, and the non-uniqueness of deprojection and related biases in potential inference, especially acute for triaxial bars. When applied to mock datasets with known 3d shape, our method correctly recovers the pattern speed and other potential parameters. However, more work is needed to systematically address these two problems for real observational datasets.

We obtained equations for a thin magnetic accretion disk, using the method of asymptotic approximation. They cannot be solved analytically-without solutions for a magnetic field in the magnetosphere between the star and the disk, only a set of general conditions on the solutions can be derived. To compare the analytical results with numerical solutions, we find expressions for physical quantities in the disk, using our results from resistive and viscous star-disk magnetospheric interaction simulations.

We present a model for hydrodynamic + N-body simulations of star cluster formation and evolution using AMUSE. Our model includes gas dynamics, star formation in regions of dense gas, stellar evolution and a galactic tidal spiral potential, thus incorporating most of the processes that play a role in the evolution of star clusters.

We test our model on initial conditions of two colliding molecular clouds as well as a section of a spiral arm from a previous galaxy simulation.

The Thai National Observatory (TNO) is equipped with a 2.4-m Ritchey-Chretien telescope and the high-speed versatile Ultraspec camera. The instrument employs a low-noise frame-transfer EMCCD, suitable for the observation of faint objects and for high-time-resolution astrophysics. We present some of the results obtained in the first four years of operation, focusing particularly on fast photometry of lunar and stellar occultations, and follow-up efforts on a few white-dwarf binaries. Among the latter is the polar cataclysmic variable UZ For. This system displays period changes and is suspected of hosting circumbinary planets. Our high-speed photometry data show a decreasing trend in the O–C diagram of UZ For. Using our new data set, we will investigate whether the period change in this binary is due to a possible third body, or to other mechanism(s).

By performing the multi-epoch monitoring observation with KaVA at 43 GHz, we investigate the kinematics of the notable newborn bright component C3 located at the tip of the recurrent jet of 3C 84. During 2015 August-September,we discover the positional flip of the C3 component about 0.4 milli-arcsecond in angular scale. The flux density of the C3 component coherently showed the monotonic increase after the flip during our monitoring period. These phenomena are in good agreement with characteristic behaviors of a jet propagation in clumpy ambient medium predicted in hydrodynamical simulations.

We report on the Bulge Asymmetries and Dynamic Evolution (BAaDE) survey which has observed 19 000 MSX color selected red giant stars for SiO maser emission at 43 GHz with the VLA and is in the process of observing 9 000 of these stars with ALMA at 86 GHz in the Southern sky. Our setup covers the main maser transitions, as well as those of isotopologues and selected lines of carbon-bearing species. Observations of this set of lines allow a far-reaching catalog of line-of-sight velocities in the dust-obscured regions where optical surveys cannot reach. Our preliminary detection rate is close to 70%, predicting a wealth of new information on the distribution of metal rich stars, their kinematics as function of location in the Galaxy, as well as the occurrence of lines and line ratios between the different transitions in combination with the spectral energy distribution from about 1 to 100 μm. Similar to the OH/IR stars, a clear kinematic signature between disk and bulge stars can be seen. Furthermore, the SiO J = →10 (v=3) line plays a prominent role in the derived maser properties.