Abstract

Contributed Talk - Splinter Computation

Thursday, 24 September 2020, 09:28   (virtual room B)

Formation and evolution of stellar clusters in a cosmological context

Marta Reina-Campos
Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg

Stellar clusters are present in the local Universe in a variety of environments, from the current cluster formation sites in the disks of the the Antennae galaxies to the old GC population that mostly populates the halo of the Milky Way, implying that their evolution is tightly linked to that of their host galaxy. To understand the observed cluster populations, I will discuss the hypothesis that GCs are the relics of regular cluster formation at high redshift that survived until the present day using the suite of 25 present day Milky Way-mass cosmological zoom-in simulations from E-MOSAICS project (Pfeffer+2018, Kruijssen+2019). These simulations enable the self-consistent study of the formation and co-evolution of stellar clusters and their host galaxies through cosmic time, and with them, I will explain how we can use GC populations to reconstruct the merger history of the host galaxy. Lastly, I will also discuss how this framework can be improved by considering the formation and evolution of stellar clusters in the cold and dense cosmic environments of the EMP-Pathfinder simulations (Reina-Campos+ in prep.).