As suggested by the ΛCDM model, globular clusters (GCs) are the first stellar associations formed in the early Universe, thus their physical properties are strongly linked with those of their host galaxies. These ancient star clusters have survived destruction over long galactic histories to become the fossil relics of the earliest epoch of galaxy formation. Consequently, they represent powerful tools to investigate on the formation and evolution of galaxies. However, the information coming from the analysis of handful of Milky Way (MW) GCs may still be incomplete, either because some of them are very faint, too small or widespread, or embedded by dust and thus difficult to find. Indeed, most of the “missing” GCs are likely located in obscured regions, close to the Galactic centre or near the Galactic plane on the far side of the Galaxy.

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My long term main goal is to search for these hidden GCs in order to reconstruct the formation history of our Galaxy. For doing that, I usually combine observational data from the optical Gaia Mission, the near-IR VVV/VVVX and 2MASS surveys for photometric studies. Whereas, I use data from APOGEE survey and IGRINS@Gemini-South spectrograph for spectroscopic analysis. 

Stay tuned for the next achievements 😜