Young Massive Clusters: Their Population Properties, Formation and Evolution, and Their Relation to the Ancient Globular Clusters

TL;DR

This review explores the properties, formation, and evolution of Young Massive Clusters (YMCs), their potential connection to ancient globular clusters, and implications for galaxy formation, highlighting observational biases and population characteristics.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive synthesis of YMC properties, discusses biases in sample construction, and examines their possible evolutionary link to globular clusters, advancing understanding of cluster formation.

Findings

YMCs have diverse luminosity, mass, and size distributions.

Incompleteness biases can mislead conclusions about cluster survival.

YMCs may be progenitors of some globular clusters.

Abstract

This review summarises the main properties of Young Massive Clusters (YMCs), including their population properties, particularly focusing on extragalactic cluster samples. We discuss potential biases and caveats that can affect the construction of cluster samples and how incompleteness effects can result in erroneous conclusions regarding the long term survival of clusters. In addition to the luminosity, mass and age distributions of the clusters, we discuss the size distribution and profile evolution of the clusters. We also briefly discuss the stellar populations within YMCs. The final part of the review focusses on the connections between YMCs and the ancient globular clusters, whether or not they are related objects and how we can use what we know about YMC formation and evolution to understand how GCs formed in the early universe and how they relate to galaxy formation/evolution.