Resolving stellar populations within the Local Group

What is the origin of globular clusters ?

How did they assemble the stellar population ?

NORFEO-SHARP, with its two facilities NEXUS and VESPER, will serve as a groundbreaking facility for studying stellar populations, both within the Local Group (in resolved detail) and beyond (by inferring integrated-light properties through the IFU technology). Our objectives are to homogeneously  measure kinematics at high spatial resolution, spanning from the inner regions to the outskirts of various systems, including open/globular clusters, nuclear star clusters, ultra-compact dwarfs, extended clusters, faint fuzzies, and diffuse star clusters.

Furthermore, our aim is to infer the light-element abundance pattern in thousands of stars within these clusters to establish the presence of multiple populations, akin to Galactic globular clusters. Through this, we intend to uncover correlations between the binary fractions and kinematics of these multiple populations. Moreover, our investigation will focus on identifying integrated light spectroscopic signatures of the multiple population phenomena in the thousands of massive clusters within the Local Volume.

Through the global chemical properties of these systems, such as metallicity and [alpha/Fe], combined with the measurement of their age (thanks to detailed colour-magnitude diagrams), we will be able to study the chemical evolution of their host galaxy.