Star formation is a vital phenomenon across all fields of astronomy, shaping our universe in all its vastness, from the small scale of exoplanets to the large scales of galaxies and beyond. There are nevertheless still many unknowns surrounding star formation because of its complexity. Spiral arms are important sites of star formation, yet in spite

The abundance of alpha and neutron-capture elements provide an important fossil signature in Galactic archaeology for tracing the chemical evolution of the Milky Way stellar populations. The combination with the astrometry and photometry from the Gaia data releases allow us to build an accurate time evolving chemodynamical picture of the Galaxy

The exquisite angular resolution and sensitivity of JWST are opening a new window for our understanding of the Universe. In nearby galaxies, JWST observations are revolutionizing our understanding of the first phases of star formation and the dusty interstellar medium. Nineteen local galaxies spanning a range of properties and morphologies across

We present the largest catalog to date of star clusters and compact associations in nearby galaxies. We have performed a V-band-selected census of clusters across the 38 spiral galaxies of the PHANGS–Hubble Space Telescope (HST) Treasury Survey, and measured integrated, aperture-corrected near-ultraviolet-U-B-V-I photometry. This work has resulted

In recent years, a technology developed between the 1950s and 1970s by the pioneering experiments of Hanbury Brown and Twiss has (re)emerged: the Stellar Intensity Interferometry (SII). Unlike amplitude interferometry, SII exploits a second-order effect that can be measured by correlating the light intensities at different detectors without the

The ESA PLATO (PLAnetary Transits and Oscillations of stars) mission aims at the detection and characterisation (radii, mass, density, age) of terrestrial exoplanets in orbits up to the habitable zone around Sun-like stars. To achieve these goals, an optimised complementary Ground-based Observations Programme (GOP) is set up with the purpose to