Research Progress in Star Clusters and Stellar Systems

Dear Colleagues,

Star clusters are the building blocks of our luminous Universe. By virtue of over-density and random motion of stars, gravitationally bound star clusters and stellar associations can give rise to a wide range of astrophysical phenomena such as the formation of unusual stellar collision products, compact-object binaries, and gravitational-wave sources. How very dense, young star clusters are assembled, especially those containing hundred-thousands to millions of young stars within some parsecs, is still largely an open question. Undoubtedly, star clusters and stellar systems offer a wide, rich, and multi-disciplinary field of research, equivocally for observers and theorists. With present and upcoming cutting-age observatories such as Very Large Telescope, Gaia, James Webb Space Telescope, Thirty Meter Telescope, Athena, third-generation and space-based gravitational-wave detectors and with the continued developments of high-performance computing, the research field of stellar systems and star clusters will only escalate and broaden.

This Special Issue, hosted by Galaxies, aims at bringing together star cluster-related topics that are of particular interest at present or in the near future. We invite submissions of both original research papers and review-style articles related to star clusters and stellar systems (young clusters, open clusters, stellar associations, gas-embedded systems, globular clusters, galactic nuclear clusters). We are happy to consider all topics concerning star clusters and especially encourage submissions covering one or more of the following sub-topics:

• Formation and assembly of young star clusters;
• Physics of dynamical systems;
• Computational challenges of gravitational many-body systems;
• Stellar remnants in star clusters: observational signatures;
• Dynamical assembly of gravitational-wave sources;
• Open star clusters;
• Stellar initial mass function;
• Intermediate mass black holes in star clusters;
• Observing stellar clusters and streams with Gaia;
• Prospects of observing clusters with next-generation telescopes;
• Applications of data science and machine learning to stellar systems.

Dr. Sambaran Banerjee
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Galaxies is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1500 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.