Star Clusters in Low & Intermediate Mass Galaxies

Our March meeting saw Dr David Cole of UCLAN tell us how observations with the high resolution instruments from the Hubble Space Telescope have revealed that many low and intermediate mass galaxies contain a dense star cluster at their centre.  These star clusters are among the densest stellar systems known. They have been found in galaxies which also have a super-massive black hole at their centre and the Milky Way is in fact an example of such a system. The formation of these star clusters seems to be intimately related to the formation of the host galaxy because their properties have a strong relationship to the properties of the host galaxy.