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Open clusters (OCs) act as key probes that can be leveraged to constrain the formation and evolution of the Milky Way (MW)’s disk, as each has a unique chemical fingerprint and well-constrained age. Significant Galactic dynamic interactions can leave imprints on the orbital properties of OCs, allowing us to use the present-day properties of long-lived OCs to reconstruct the MW’s dynamic history. To explore these changes, we identify OC analogs in FIRE-2 simulations of MW-mass galaxies. For this work, we focus on one particular FIRE-2 OC, which we identify as an analog to the old, subsolar, distant, and high-Galactic-latitude MW OC, Berkeley 20. Our simulated OC resides ∼6 kpc from the galactic center and ultimately reaches a height $\mid Z_{\max }\mid >2$kpc from the galactic disk, similar to Berkeley 20. We trace the simulated cluster’s orbital and environmental history, identifying key perturbative episodes, including (1) an interaction with a gas overdensity in a spiral arm that prompts an outward migration event and (2) a substantial interaction with a Sagittarius Dwarf Spheroidal Galaxy–mass satellite that causes significant orbital modification. Our simulated OC shows significant resilience to disruption during both its outward migration and the satellite-driven heating event that causes subsequent inward migration. Ultimately, we find these two key processes—migration and satellite heating—are essential to include when assessing OC orbital dynamics in the era of Gaia. 

Abstract The physical mechanisms responsible for bar formation and destruction in galaxies remain a subject of debate. While we have gained valuable insight into how bars form and evolve from isolated idealized simulations, in the cosmological domain, galactic bars evolve in complex environments, with mergers and gas accretion events occurring in the presence of the turbulent interstellar medium with multiple star formation episodes, in addition to coupling with their host galaxies’ dark matter halos. We investigate the bar formation in 13 Milky Way–mass galaxies from the Feedback in Realistic Environments (FIRE-2) cosmological zoom-in simulations. 8 of the 13 simulated galaxies form bars at some point during their history: three from tidal interactions and five from internal evolution of the disk. The bars in FIRE-2 are generally shorter than the corotation radius (mean bar radius ∼1.53 kpc), have a wide range of pattern speeds (36–97 km s⁻¹kpc⁻¹), and live for a wide range of dynamical times (2–160 bar rotations). We find that the bar formation in FIRE-2 galaxies is influenced by satellite interactions and the stellar-to-dark-matter mass ratio in the inner galaxy, but neither is a sufficient condition for bar formation. Bar formation is more likely to occur, with the bars formed being stronger and longer-lived, if the disks are kinematically cold; galaxies with high central gas fractions and/or vigorous star formation, on the other hand, tend to form weaker bars. In the case of the FIRE-2 galaxies, these properties combine to produce ellipsoidal bars with strengthsA₂/A₀∼ 0.1–0.2.