Multiple populations in massive star clusters under the magnifying glass of photometry: Theory and tools

TL;DR

This paper reviews the theoretical background and photometric tools used to identify and study multiple stellar populations in massive star clusters, highlighting recent advances and future prospects with upcoming telescopes.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of photometric techniques for analyzing multiple populations in star clusters, emphasizing their importance and potential for future research.

Findings

Photometry has been crucial in discovering multiple populations beyond spectroscopy.

Methods have revealed correlations between multiple populations and cluster properties.

Upcoming telescopes will extend studies to clusters beyond the Local Group.

Abstract

The existence of star-to-star light-element abundance variations in massive Galactic and extragalactic star clusters has fairly recently superseded the traditional paradigm of individual clusters hosting stars with the same age, and uniform chemical composition. Several scenarios have been put forward to explain the origin of this multiple stellar population phenomenon, but so far all have failed to reproduce the whole range of key observations. Complementary to high-resolution spectroscopy, which has first revealed and characterized chemically the presence of multiple populations in Galactic globular clusters, photometry has been instrumental in investigating this phenomenon in much larger samples of stars --adding a number of crucial observational constraints and correlations with global cluster properties-- and in the discovery and characterization of multiple populations also in Magellanic Clouds' intermediate age clusters. The purpose of this review is to present the theoretical underpinning and application of the photometric techniques devised to identify and study multiple populations in resolved star clusters. These methods have played and continue to play a crucial role in advancing our knowledge of the cluster multiple population phenomenon, and promise to extend the scope of these investigations to resolved clusters even beyond the Local Group, with the launch of the James Webb Space Telescope.