CENTRA Seminar - Stellar clusters: laboratories for understanding how stars form and evolve - 15 dezembro 2017

Gaia is a cornerstone mission of the European Space Agency (ESA) launched in December 19 2013. Its main scientific goal is to understand the structure and Astronomy is a science of observation, and unlike biologists or chemists, astronomers cannot manipulate the objects they study. And since knowing a distance and the age of individual stars is a very difficult task, astronomers turn to stellar clusters, collections of stars born at the same time from the same cosmic material. Star clusters are the closest thing astronomers have to a controlled laboratory environment, and are the main targets to understand how stars form and evolve. In this talk I will present different types of star clusters, their location in the Milky Way, describe their life and birth, and the many things we can learn from them.