ICCUB SEMINAR: Formation and evolution of GCs in a cosmological context: the E-MOSAICS project

Their formation mechanism is heavily debated in the modern literature, but their old ages make them excellent probes of the conditions of the early Universe.

I will review the hypothesis where GCs are the relics of regular cluster formation at high redshift that survived until z=0. To quantitatively address this hypothesis, I will present the E-MOSAICS project, a suite of 25 present day Milky Way-mass cosmological zoom-in simulations that enables the self-consistent study of the formation and co-evolution of stellar clusters and their host galaxies through cosmic time. I will discuss how a wide range of observables of cluster populations are reproduced in the simulations, such as the number of GCs per unit stellar mass and their radial distribution, and I will explain how we can use GC populations to reconstruct the merger history of the host galaxy, with applications to the Milky Way.