Related papers: Fuel for Galaxy Disks
So how did the Galactic disk form and can the sequence of events ever be unravelled from the vast stellar inventory? This will require that some of the residual inhomogeneities from prehistory escaped the dissipative process at an early…
The prevalence of light element enhancement in the most metal-poor stars is potentially an indication that the Milky Way has a metallicity floor for star formation around $\sim$10$^{-3.5}$ Z$_{\odot}$. We propose that this metallicity floor…
We examine metallicities, ages and orbital properties of halo stars in a Milky-Way like disk galaxy formed in the cosmological hydrodynamical MaGICC simulations. Halo stars were either accreted from satellites or they formed in situ in the…
We present a pair of high-resolution smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH) simulations that explore the evolution and cooling behavior of hot gas around Milky-Way size galaxies. The simulations contain the same total baryonic mass and are…
Eliptical and bulge galaxies share a tight correlation of velocity distribution to both luminosity and black hole mass. There are similar orbital speeds for all galaxies of a given luminosity including dark matter (DM) at large radii. The…
The evolution of galaxies results from a combination of internal and external processes. The star formation is an internal process transforming cold and dense cores of molecular clouds to stars. It may be triggered internally by expanding…
The gas reservoir of galaxies can be altered by outflows driven by star-formation and luminous active galactic nuclei. Jets heating the surroundings of host galaxies can also prevent gas cooling and inflows. Spectacular examples for these…
Three-dimensional simulations of the disk-halo interaction show the formation of a thick HI and HII gas disk with different scale heights. The thick HI disk prevents the disk gas from expanding freely upwards, unless some highly energetic…
In this paper we adopt a chemical evolution model, which is an improved version of the Chiappini, Matteucci and Gratton (1997) model, assuming two main accretion episodes for the formation of the Galaxy. The present model takes into account…
Recent, high sensitivity, HI observations of nearby spiral galaxies show that their thin `cold' disks are surrounded by thick layers (halos) of neutral gas with anomalous kinematics. We present results for three galaxies viewed at different…
The present day chemical and dynamical properties of the Milky Way bear the imprint of the Galaxy's formation and evolutionary history. One of the most enduring and critical debates surrounding Galactic evolution is that regarding the…
The development of our understanding of the gaseous component of the interstellar medium is reviewed. During the 20th century our picture of diffuse material in space has grown from a simple model of isolated clouds in thermal equilibrium…
Cosmological hydrodynamical simulations as well as observations indicate that spiral galaxies are comprised of five different components: dark matter halo, stellar disc, stellar bulge, gaseous disc and gaseous halo. While the first four…
Circumgalactic gas around massive galaxies generally has a volume-filling component -- an atmosphere -- with a temperature determined by the potential-well depth of the galaxy's halo. If the atmosphere is near hydrostatic equilibrium and is…
We examine the HI content and environment of all of the Local Group dwarf galaxies (M_tot < 10^10 M_solar), including the numerous newly discovered satellites of the Milky Way and M31. All of the new dwarfs, with the exception of Leo T,…
The cosmic history of star formation is briefly reviewed, starting with the Milky Way and then discussing observations relevant to the closed box and hierarchical build-up models. Observations of local star formation are reviewed for…
Detailed studies of stellar populations in the halos of the Milky Way and the Andromeda (M 31) galaxies have shown increasing numbers of tidal streams and dwarf galaxies, attesting to a complicated and on-going process of hierarchical…
We explore the elemental abundance features of metal-rich disk stars, highlighting the comparisons made with those of the recently revealed Galactic bulge stars. A similarity between two of the comparisons leads to a new theoretical picture…
We perform numerical simulations for the formation of the Galactic stellar halo, based on the currently favored cold dark matter (CDM) theory of galaxy formation. Our numerical models, taking into account both dynamical and chemical…
So far, six mechanisms have been proposed to account for the Galactic disk heating. Of these, the most important appear to be a combination of scattering of stars by molecular clouds and by spiral arms. We study a further mechanism, namely,…