Related papers: The Galactic Thick Disk: An Observational Perspect…
The disc structure of the Milky Way is marked by a chemical dichotomy, with high-alpha and low-alpha abundance sequences, traditionally identified with the geometric thick and thin discs. This identification is aided by the old ages of the…
Present-day disc galaxies often exhibit distinct thin and thick discs. The formation mechanisms of the two discs and the timing of their onset remain open questions. To address these questions, we select edge-on galaxies from flagship JWST…
Recent large scale surveys of galactic bulge stars allowed to build a detailed map of the bulge kinematics. The bulge exhibits cylindrical rotation consistent with a disky origin which evolved through bar driven secular evolution. However…
Most of the visible mass in a typical spiral galaxy is distributed in a thin disk, with a radial extent much larger than its thickness. While the planar disk structure, including non-axisymmetric features such as spiral structure, has been…
The determination of chemical abundances in star-forming galaxies and the study of their evolution on cosmological timescales are powerful tools for understanding galaxy formation and evolution. This contribution presents the latest results…
Since stellar populations enhance particular element abundances according to the yields and lifetimes of the stellar progenitors, the chemical evolution of galaxies serves as one of the key tools that allows the tracing of galaxy evolution.…
The disks that orbit young stars are the essential conduits and reservoirs of material for star and planet formation. Their structures, meaning the spatial variations of the disk physical conditions, reflect the underlying mechanisms that…
We analyze the global structure of 34 late-type, edge-on, undisturbed, disk galaxies spanning a wide range of mass. We measure structural parameters for the galaxies using two-dimensional least-squares fitting to our $R$-band photometry.…
Observations reveal that mature spiral galaxies consist of stars, gases and plasma approximately distributed in a thin disk of circular shape, usually with a central bulge. The rotation velocities quickly increase from the galactic center…
The Milky Way is a barred galaxy whose central bulge has a box/peanut shape and consists of multiple stellar populations with different orbit distributions. This review describes dynamical and chemo-dynamical equilibrium models for the…
I review recent observational progress concerning the evolution of the morphological distribution of galaxies in the rich cluster environment and in the faint field population. By coupling HST imagery with ground-based spectroscopic…
We develop a detailed model of the Milky Way (a ``prototypical'' disk galaxy) and extend it to other disks with the help of some simple scaling relations, obtained in the framework of Cold Dark Matter models. This phenomenological…
Galactic discs are known to have a complex multilayer structure. An in-depth study of the stellar population properties of the thin and thick components can elucidate the formation and evolution of disc galaxies. Even though thick discs are…
In this review I concentrate on three areas related to structure of disks in spiral galaxies. First I will review the work on structure, kinematics and dynamics of stellar disks. Next I will review the progress in the area of flaring of HI…
Galaxy masses play a fundamental role in our understanding of structure formation models. This review addresses the variety and reliability of mass estimators that pertain to stars, gas, and dark matter. The different sections on masses…
We study the orbital properties of stars in four (published) simulations of thick disks formed by: i) accretion from disrupted satellites, ii) heating of a pre-existing thin disk by a minor merger, iii) radial migration and iv) gas rich…
In this contribution we summarize recent achievements by our group on the understanding of the structure of the outer Galactic disk, with particular emphasis to the outer disk extent, and the spiral structure beyond the solar circle.
In this review I outline some ideas in chemical evolution, necessary for understanding the evolution of galaxies from measured elemental abundance ratios. I then discuss abundance results from studies of Local Group dwarf galaxies and the…
We investigate thin and thick stellar disc formation in Milky-Way-mass galaxies using twelve FIRE-2 cosmological zoom-in simulations. All simulated galaxies experience an early period of bursty star formation that transitions to a late-time…
Some factors connecting the evolutionary histories of galaxies with the characteristics of their cluster systems are reviewed. Unanswered questions include: How is one to understand the observation that some globular cluster systems have…