Antonino Milone is an expert of resolved stellar populations in the Milky Way and in nearby galaxies.

His research activity is mostly focused on multiple stellar populations in old Galactic globular clusters and in young Magellanic-Clouds star clusters.
The techniques that he uses include high-precision photometry and astrometry from Hubble Space Telescope images and high-resolution spectroscopy from data collected with the Very Large Telescope and with the major ground-based facilities.

These studies allow to constrain those events, which occurred just a few hundreds million years after the Big Bang and are responsible for the assembly of the Milky Way and the re-ionization of the early Universe.

1. NEAR-FIELD COSMOLOGY WITH GLOBULAR CLUSTERS
Supervisors: Antonino Milone, Anna Fabiola Marino

How did the globular clusters formed in the early Universe?
What is their role in the assembly of the Galactic Halo?
Which is their contribution to the re-ionization of the Universe?
This is a thesis project to address such hot topics by investigating stellar populations in globular clusters.

In recent years, our group has developed new revolutionary tools for characterizing multiple populations in star clusters. These tools, which are based on the synergy between spectroscopy and multi-band photometry have dramatically changed our view of globular clusters and resulted in the most-important and most-cited papers of the field (e.g. Milone et al. 2017).
The candidate will exploit these innovative tools to i) analyze UV, visual and NIR photometry from the Hubble Space Telescope and from the major wide-field ground-based facilities.
ii) and/or study high-resolution spectra collected with the VLT and other major telescopes.
This project will provide new insights on the processes that occurred at high redshift and resulted in the formation of multiple populations and in the assembly of the Galaxy.
This thesis is complementary to the project 'GALFOR' funded by the European Research Council. The candidate will be involved in an international team, which includes the major experts of the field.



2. MULTIPLE POPULATIONS IN YOUNG MAGELLANIC-CLOUDS CLUSTERS
Supervisor: Antonino Milone

The discovery of multiple populations in young and intermediate-age clusters has been one of the major findings in the field of stellar populations of the last decade (e.g. Milone et al. 2009). Their origin is one of the most-intriguing open issues of stellar astrophysics and provides new constraints on the assembly of the galaxies and on star formation and evolution.
The Hubble Space Telescope has recently collected for us an unique dataset to investigate, for the first time, the multiple-population phenomenon in a large sample of young clusters (GO-14710, PI. Milone).
The candidate will investigate this dataset together with additional HST archive images by using the most-advanced techniques of data reduction and analysis. Results will provide a major breakthrough in our understanding of the multiple-population phenomenon.
This thesis is complementary to the project 'GALFOR' funded by the European Research Council. The candidate will be involved in an international team, which includes the major experts of the field.