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COSMIC-LAB: Terzan 5 as a fossil remnant of the Galactic bulge formation epoch

The formation and evolution of galaxy bulges is one of the most debated topics in the modern astrophysics. One approach to address this issue is to look at the Galactic bulge since it is the closest. According to some theoretical models, our bulge may have built up from the merger of substructures formed from the fragmentation of a gaseous disk in the early phases of Galactic evolution. We may have discovered the remnant of one of these substructures in the stellar system Terzan 5. In fact, Terzan 5 hosts two stellar populations with quite different iron abundances, thus suggesting it once was far more massive than today. Moreover, its peculiar chemistry strikingly resembles that observed in the Galactic bulge. In this Thesis we performed a detailed photometric and spectroscopic analysis of this cluster to determine its formation and evolution. Form the photometric point of view we built a high-resolution differential reddening map in the direction of the system and we measured relative proper motions to separate its member population from the contaminating bulge and disk stars. From the spectroscopic point of view we measured abundances for more than 600 stars belonging to Terzan 5 and its surroundings in order to build the largest field-decontaminated metallicity distribution for this system. We find that the metallicity distribution is extremely broad (>1 dex) and we discovered a third, metal-poor and alpha-enhanced population with average [Fe/H]=-0.8 dex. The striking similarity between Terzan 5 and the bulge in terms of their chemical formation and evolution that is clearly revealed by this Thesis suggests that Terzan 5 formed in situ with the Galactic bulge. In particular its metal-poor populations trace the early stages of the bulge formation, while its most metal-rich component may contain crucial information on the bulge more recent evolution.