🔹Title: Bulge Fossil Fragments as tracers of the Galactic Bulge formation process
🔹Speaker: Prof. Francesco Ferraro (University of Bologna)
🔹Abstract: The formation and evolutionary processes of galaxy bulges are still unclear, and the presence of young stars in the bulge of the Milky Way is largely debated. We recently discovered that two objects commonly catalogued as bulge globular clusters (Terzan 5 and Liller 1) are actually complex stellar systems hosting stars with very different ages and a striking chemical similarity to the field population. They probably are remnants of more massive structures that, in place of dissolving and contributing to the hierarchical assembling of the bulge, evolved in isolation and experienced a second burst of star formation. In this talk I summarize the main findings and discuss the possible link among these systems and the massive clumps observed at high redshift. Indeed, we likely discovered the crucial missing piece in the bulge formation puzzle: the connection between what we observe in the distant and in the local Universe.
