Lessons Learned from This Thesis

Abstract

Based on all the results of stellar populations in SCs of various ages, a fundamental question pertaining to these SCs is: do the GCs and young SCs have the same origin? To answer this question, lots of discussions have focused on the difference between their physical parameters, like the mass, size, age and spatial distributions. Now we have another aspect that may contribute to this issue, the stellar populations. The origin of MSPs in GCs is still an open question, as most popular theories invoke large age spreads within GCs, which indicates that the new stellar populations should be polluted by early generation stars, as already introduced in Chap. 2. In many proposed scenarios, the secondary stellar populations in GCs are speculated to be related to the ejecta of their first generation stars. Except for scenarios invokes merger of SCs, all these scenarios would suggest that a GC should have a much more massive origin (at least 10 times more massive or more), the so called ‘mass budget problems’.