Tristan Cantat – The structure and history of the Milky Way disc, as told by its star clusters

Titre: The structure and history of the Milky Way disc, as told by its star clusters

Par : Tristan Cantat (MPIA)

Abstract:

The Gaia mission has had a huge impact on our ability to detect, classify, and characterise stellar aggregates in the Milky Way. It has greatly improved the census of star clusters of all ages, from the Solar neighbourhood to the edge of the Galaxy. Gaia has revealed the complex spatial structure of young associations, and shown that their overall distribution only weakly correlates with the expected spiral pattern of the Milky Way. At the other end of the timeline, we are now able to visualise the process of cluster disruption, and to map the spatial distribution of clusters up to several Gyr with unprecedented precision, unraveling the evolution of the Milky. Despite the recent advances, we still do not know what are the main parameters that allow some clusters to survive to old ages, or even if the Milky Way is still forming gravitationally bound clusters. The upcoming ground-based campaigns WEAVE and 4MOST as well as future space-based astrometric missions such as JASMINE and GaiaNIR hold the keys to better understanding the cluster population in the Milky Way.