Image Credit: NOIRLab/NSF/AURA

Age Dating Globular Clusters

June 2023 - September 2023

Supervisor: Rev. Richard D'Souza (Vatican Observatory)

This project aims to determine the ages and metallicities of various open and globular clusters in the Milky Way using isochrone fitting on Gaia data. By comparing the observed colour-magnitude diagrams of clusters to theoretical isochrones, we can determine the age of the clusters as well as their metallicities. The pipeline involved fetching Gaia data for a given cluster, cleaning the data using masks on proper motion and parallax, and fitting isochrones to the cleaned data. The objective of this project was to learn coding in Python and get familiar with astronomical data and the Gaia archive as well as to learn some data processing techniques.