Related papers: The age of the Galaxy's thick disk
The orbit distribution of young stars in the Galactic disk is highly structured, from well-defined clusters to streams of stars that may be widely dispersed across the sky, but are compact in orbital action-angle space. The age distribution…
The relationship between the geometrical properties of stellar disks (a flatness and truncation radius) and the disk kinematics are considered for edge-on galaxies. It is shown that the observed thickness of the disks and the approximate…
Numerical simulations of galaxy formation within the cold dark matter (CDM) hierarchical clustering framework are unable to produce large disk galaxies without invoking some form of feedback to suppress gas cooling and collapse to a…
We investigated the habitability of the Milky Way, making use of recent observational analysis on the prevalence of Earth-sized planets, in order to estimate where and when potentially habitable star systems may have formed over the course…
We explore the structure of the element abundance--age--orbit distribution of the stars in the Milky Way's low-$\alpha$ disk, by (re-)deriving precise [Fe/H], [X/Fe] and ages, along with orbits, for red clump stars from the APOGEE survey.…
The present-day state of the Milky Way disk can tell us much about the history of our Galaxy and provide insights into its formation. We have constructed a high-precision catalogue of disk stars using data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey…
We determined the age of the stellar content of the Galactic halo by considering main-sequence turn-off stars. From the large number of halo stars provided by Sloan Digital Sky Survey, we could accurately detect the turn-off as a function…
The Milky Way serves as a template for understanding the formation and evolution of late-type massive disk galaxies since we can obtain detailed chemical and kinematic information for large samples of individual stars. However, the early…
We present an alternative interpretation of the nature of the extremely cool, high-velocity white dwarfs identified by Oppenheimer et al (2001) in a high-latitude astrometric survey. We argue that the velocity distribution of the majority…
By searching the IRAS and ISO databases we compiled a list of 60 debris disks which exhibit the highest fractional luminosity values (fd>10^-4) in the vicinity of the Sun (d<120pc). Eleven out of these 60 systems are new discoveries.…
A simple model for the evolution of disc galaxies is presented. We adopt three numbers from observations of the Milky Way disc, the local surface mass density, the stellar scale length (of the assumedly exponential disc) and the amplitude…
In this review, we present a brief description of observational efforts to understand the Galactic thick disk and its relation to the other Galactic components. This review primarily focused on elemental abundance patterns of the thick disk…
We re-examine the age-velocity dispersion relation in the solar neighborhood using improved stellar age estimates that are based on Hipparcos parallaxes and recent stellar evolution calculations. The resulting relation shows that the Milky…
Disks are a natural outcome of the star formation process in which they play a crucial role. Luminous, massive stars of spectral type earlier than B4 are likely to be those that benefit most from the existence of accretion disks, which may…
Using a semi-analytical model of the evolution of the Milky Way, we show how secular evolution can create distinct overdensities in the phase space of various properties (e.g. age vs metallicity or abundance ratios vs age) corresponding to…
We derive stellar ages, from evolutionary tracks, and metallicities, from Stromgren photometry, for a sample of 5828 dwarf and sub-dwarf stars from the Hipparcos Catalogue. This stellar disk sample is used to investigate the age-metallicity…
We present an evolutionary disc model for the thin disc in the solar cylinder based on a continuous star formation history and a continuous dynamical heating of the stellar subpopulations. The vertical distribution of the stellar…
The ages of the oldest and most metal-poor stars in the Milky Way bear important information on the age of the Universe and its standard model. We analyze a sample of 28 extremely metal-poor field stars in the solar vicinity culled from the…
There are three independent techniques for determining the age of the universe: via cosmochronology of long-lived radioactive nuclei, via stellar modelling and population synthesis of the oldest stellar populations, and via the precision…
Using modern published data on velocities and spectroscopic definitions of chemical elements in stellar objects of the Galaxy, we investigated the relationship of chemical composition with the kinematics of different populations. The paper…