I will discuss the presence of massive star clusters in starburst galaxies with an emphasis on low mass galaxies outside the local group. I will show that such galaxies, with respect to their mass and luminosity, may be very rich in young luminous clusters.

We present a high-resolution simulation of globular cluster formation in a galaxy merger. For the first time in such a simulation, individual star clusters are directly identified and followed on their orbits. We quantitatively compare star formation in the merger to that in the unperturbed galaxies. The merging galaxies show a strong starburst, in sharp contrast to their isolated progenitors. ...

Our recent determination of a Salpeter slope for the IMF in the field of 30 Doradus (Selman and Melnick 2005) appears to be in conflict with simple probabilistic counting arguments advanced in the past to support observational claims of a steeper IMF in the LMC field. In this paper we re-examine these arguments and show by explicit construction that, contrary to these claims, the field IMF is e...

Although speculations of an interaction between galaxies and the ICM date back more than thirty years, the impact and importance of a possible interaction have long remained elusive. In recent years the situation has completely changed. A wealth of data and detailed hydrodynamical simulations have appeared that show the effects of interactions. Single dish observations show that cluster galaxie...

Three basic scenarios have been invocated to explain the sudden rise and decline of star formation in distant clusters that lead to the transformation of " active " galaxies into the elliptical− and S0−types which today dominate rich clusters, i.e. the so called Butcher-Oemler effect, (Butcher & Oemler,1978). These are: galaxy interactions or mergers with nearly equal mass neighbors (Lavery & H...

We investigate the evolution of the star formation rate in cluster galaxies. We complement data from the CNOC1 cluster survey (0.15 < z < 0.6) with measurements from galaxy clusters in the 2dF galaxy redshift survey (0.05 < z < 0.1) and measurements from recently published work on higher redshift clusters, up to almost z = 1. We focus our attention on galaxies in the cluster core, ie. galaxies ...

Low-mass starbursting galaxies have been proposed as the explanation of the excess of faint galaxies observed at intermediate redshifts. If this hypothesis is correct, then intermediate redshift galaxies should rotate more slowly than nearby galaxies with the same rest-frame luminosity. We present the results of a survey of the internal kinematics of intermediate redshift (z = 0.25−0.45) field ...

The small scatter observed for the (U−V ) colors of spheroidal galaxies in nearby clusters of galaxies provides a powerful constraint on the history of star formation in dense environments. However, with local data alone, it is not possible to separate models where galaxies assembled synchronously over redshifts 0 < z < 1 from ones where galaxies formed stochastically at much earlier times. Her...

We present HST WFPC2 observations, supplemented by ground-based Hα data, of the star-cluster populations in two pairs of interacting galaxies, selected for being in very different kinds of encounters seen at different stages. Dynamical information and n-body simulations provide the details of encounter geometry, mass ratio,m and timing. In NGC 5752/4, we are seeing a weak encounter well past cl...

Recent spectroscopic observations of galaxies in the Fornax-Cluster reveal nearly unresolved 'star-like' objects with red-shifts appropriate to the Fornax-Cluster. These objects have intrinsic sizes of ≈ 100 pc and absolute B-band magnitudes in the range −14 < MB < −11.5 mag and lower limits for the central surface brightness µB ≥ 23 mag/arcsec 2 (Phillipps et al. 2001, Hilker et al. 1999), and...