Download or read book On the Formation and Evolution of Stars and Star Clusters in the Milky Way written by Michael J. Alexander and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page 139 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the launch of the Spitzer Space Telescope, the field of star formation (SF) has undergone a revolution as regions of our Galaxy, once hidden, have been revealed. Large scale surveys have provided fodder on a myriad of topics, both expected and unexpected. The following work highlights my contributions to the fields of Galactic SF and cluster evolution. My dissertation begins in Chapter 2 with the discovery of a massive star cluster containing more than a dozen red supergiant stars. Based on the number of supergiants, it is one of the largest star clusters in the Galaxy, and it is now believed to be part of a burst of SF that created over $105 $ M[subscript]solar of stars in just a few Myr. Chapter 3 is my paper on a very different type of star cluster, which we termed ultracompact embedded clusters (UCECs). UCECs may represent a new class of heavily embedded ($M [subscript]gas > 100$ M[subscript]solar ), low stellar mass ($M*