Related papers: The Galactic Thick Disk: An Observational Perspect…
The thickness of a galaxy's disk provides a valuable probe of its formation and evolution history. Observations of the Milky Way and local galaxies have revealed an ubiquitous disk structure with two distinctive components: an old thick…
The recently emerging conviction that thick disks are prevalent in disk galaxies, and their seemingly ubiquitous old ages, means that the formation of the thick disk, perhaps more than any other component, holds the key to unravelling the…
The Milky Way harbours two disks that appear distinct concerning scale-heights, kinematics, and elemental abundance patterns. Recent years have seen a surge of studies of the elemental abundance trends in the disks using high resolution…
The current knowledge of the abundance structure in the Milky Way is reviewed. Special emphasis is put on recent results for stars with kinematics typical of the thin and the thick disks, respectively, and how these results can, apart from…
Ever since a thick disk was proposed to explain the vertical distribution of the Milky Way disk stars, its origin has been a recurrent question. We aim to answer this question by inspecting 19 disk galaxies with stellar mass greater than…
For several decades now, open clusters have been used to study the structure and chemical evolution of the disk of our Galaxy. Due to the fact that their ages and metallicities can be determined with relatively good precision, and since…
The Milky Way is a spiral galaxy comprising three main components: the Bulge, the Disk, and the Halo. Of particular interest is the Galactic disk, which holds a significant portion of the baryonic matter angular momentum and harbors at…
The ongoing large spectroscopic surveys of the Milky Way such as SEGUE and RAVE have enabled us to take a fresh look at the structure of the Galactic thin and thick disks, and how their structure fits within the framework of structure…
We have obtained high-resolution spectra and carried out a detailed elemental abundance analysis for a new sample of 899 F and G dwarf stars in the Solar neighbourhood. The results allow us to, in a multi-dimensional space consisting of…
Correlations between stellar kinematics and chemical abundances are fossil evidence for evolutionary connections between Galactic structural components. Extensive stellar surveys show that the only tolerably clear distinction between…
This review summarises the invited presentation I gave on the Milky Way disc. The idea underneath was to touch those topics that can be considered hot nowadays in the Galactic disk research: the reality of the thick disk, the spiral…
We compare the star-formation history and dynamics of the Milky Way (MW) with the properties of distant disk galaxies. During the first ~4 Gyr of its evolution, the MW formed stars with a high star-formation intensity (SFI), Sigma_SFR~0.6…
Thick disks are a prevalent feature observed in numerous disk galaxies including our own Milky Way. Their significance has been reported to vary widely, ranging from a few to 100% of the disk mass, depending on the galaxy and the…
Our Galaxy, the Milky Way, is a benchmark for understanding disk galaxies. It is the only galaxy whose formation history can be studied using the full distribution of stars from white dwarfs to supergiants. The oldest components provide us…
We discuss the main ingredients necessary to build models of chemical evolution of spiral galaxies and in particular the Milky Way galaxy. These ingredients include: the star formation rate, the initial mass function, the stellar yields and…
The manner the galaxy accretes matter along with the star formation rates at different epochs, influence the evolution of the stable isotopic inventories of the galaxy. A detailed analysis is presented here to study the dependence of the…
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…
In this review I will discuss the comparison between model results and observational data for the Milky Way, the predictive power of such models as well as their limits. Such a comparison, known as Galactic archaeology, allows us to impose…
Invited Review at IAU Symp 164 on Stellar Populations. The Milky Way Galaxy offers a unique opportunity for testing theories of galaxy formation and evolution. The study of the spatial distribution, kinematics and chemical abundances of…
Our Milky Way Galaxy is a typical large spiral galaxy, representative of the most common morphological type in the local Universe. We can determine the properties of individual stars in unusual detail, and use the characteristics of the…