Related papers: The long Galactic bar as seen by UKIDSS Galactic P…
The centre of the Milky Way is occupied by a nuclear star cluster, which contains the supermassive black hole Sgr A*. The cluster is embedded in the larger surrounding nuclear stellar disc. These three components dominate the mass budget of…
Thick disks appear to be common in external large spiral galaxies and our own Milky Way also hosts one. The existence of a thick disk is possibly directly linked to the formation history of the host galaxy and if its properties is known it…
The Galactic bulge is the central spheroid of our Galaxy, containing about one quarter of the total stellar mass of the Milky Way (M_bulge=1.8x10^10 M_sun; Sofue, Honma & Omodaka 2009). Being older than the disk, it is the first massive…
Complete catalogs of molecular clouds in the Milky Way allow analysis of the molecular medium and the star formation properties of the Milky Way that closely follows the method used for nearby galaxies. We explore whether the big dip in the…
We study the three-dimensional structure of the Milky Way using 65,981 Mira variable stars discovered by the Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment (OGLE) survey. The spatial distribution of the Mira stars is analyzed with a model…
We present the kinematic results from our ARGOS spectroscopic survey of the Galactic bulge of the Milky Way. Our aim is to understand the formation of the Galactic bulge. We examine the kinematics of about 17,400 stars in the bulge located…
(abridged) By comparing the distribution of dust and gas in the central regions of the Galaxy, we aim to obtain new insights into the properties of the offset dust lanes leading the bar's major axis in the Milky Way. On the one hand, the…
CONTEXT. Claims of an X-shaped Galactic bulge were based on the assumption of red clump stars as standard candles in some lines of sight crossing the off-plane bulge. However, some doubts have been cast on whether the two peaks in star…
Galaxies are not uniformly distributed in space. On large scales the Universe displays coherent structure, with galaxies residing in groups and clusters on scales of ~1-3 Mpc/h, which lie at the intersections of long filaments of galaxies…
We analyze the structure and chemo-dynamical properties of the Galactic bulge using ab-type RR Lyrae stars (RRabs) from OGLE-IV and giant stars from APOGEE and Gaia. Orbital integration of 1,879 RRab variables reveals three populations:…
The Milky Way is a unique laboratory, where stellar properties can be measured and analyzed in detail. In particular, stars in the older populations encode information on the mechanisms that led to the formation of our Galaxy. In this…
The inner ~200 pc region of the Milky Way contains a nuclear stellar disc and a nuclear star cluster that are embedded in the larger Galactic bar. These stellar systems overlap spatially, which makes it challenging to separate stars that…
Red supergiant stars (RSGs) are massive stars in a late stage of evolution, crucial for understanding stellar life cycles and Galactic structure. However, RSGs on the far side of our Galaxy have been underexplored due to observational…
Part of a large survey of the inner galactic Plane ( $ | \ell | < 45^{\circ} $ and $ | b | < 3^{\circ} $ total) in the OH 1612MHz line in search for OH/IR stars is analysed. We find strong evidence for a central m=2 distortion based on…
The bar of the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) is one of the prominent, but controversial feature regarding its location with respect to the disk of the LMC. In order to study the relative location of the bar with respect to the disk, we…
The color-magnitude diagram of $ \sim 3 \times 10^5 $ stars obtained for Baade's Window towards the Galactic bulge with the OGLE project reveals a surprisingly narrow main sequence due to galactic disk stars at a distance of $d \sim 2 $…
We show that the small intrinsic spread in luminosities of red clump giants can be used to constrain the differences in the streaming motions of Galatic bulge stars on the near side and those on the far side. We propose two methods to…
The nuclear stellar disc (NSD) is a dense stellar structure at the centre of our Galaxy. Given its proximity, it constitutes a unique laboratory to understand other galactic nuclei. Nevertheless, the high crowding and extinction hamper its…
On the basis of the near infrared observations of bulge red clump stars near the Galactic center, we have determined the galactocentric distance to be R_0 = 7.52 +- 0.10 (stat) +- 0.35 (sys) kpc. We observed the red clump stars at |l| < 1.0…
The spatial distribution of known globular clusters (GCs) in the Milky Way shows that the current census of GCs is incomplete in the direction of the Galactic plane. We present the discovery of two new GCs located close to the Galactic…