Related papers: Our Milky Way as a Pure-Disk Galaxy -- A Challenge…
Near infrared images from the COBE satellite presented the first clear evidence that our Milky Way galaxy contains a boxy shaped bulge. Recent years have witnessed a gradual paradigm shift in the formation and evolution of the Galactic…
By analyzing a N-body simulation of a bulge formed simply via a bar instability mechanism operating on a kinematically cold stellar disk, and by comparing the results of this analysis with the structural and kinematic properties of the main…
The assembly of the Milky Way bulge is an old topic in astronomy, one now in a period of renewed and rapid development. The dominant scenario for bulge formation is that of the Milky Way as a nearly pure disk galaxy, with the inner disk…
The Galactic bulge is now considered to be the inner three-dimensional part of the Milky Way's bar. It has a peanut shape and is characterized by cylindrical rotation. In N-body simulations, box/peanut bulges arise from disks through bar…
Observations show a clear vertical metallicity gradient in the Galactic bulge, which is often taken as a signature of dissipative processes in the formation of a classical bulge. Various evidence shows, however, that the Milky Way is a…
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…
Two main scenarios for the formation of the Galactic bulge are invoked, the first one through gravitational collapse or hierarchical merging of subclumps, the second through secular evolution of the Galactic disc. We aim to constrain the…
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…
The Galactic bulge, that is the prominent out-of-plane over-density present in the inner few kiloparsecs of the Galaxy, is a complex structure, as the morphology, kinematics, chemistry and ages of its stars indicate. To understand 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 model the formation of a bar plus box/peanut bulge (BP bulge) component in a Milky Way-like disc galaxy using simulations of isolated multi-component systems that evolve from equilibrium initial conditions. The simulations are designed…
Using three fiducial Nbody+SPH simulations, we follow the merging of two disk galaxies with a hot gaseous halo component each, and examine whether the merger remnant can be a spiral galaxy. The stellar progenitor disks are destroyed by…
The Milky Way is a spiral galaxy with the Schechter characteristic luminosity $L_*$, thus an important anchor point of the Hubble sequence of all spiral galaxies. Yet the true appearance of the Milky Way has remained elusive for centuries.…
We present new results from BRAVA, a large scale radial velocity survey of the Galactic bulge, using M giant stars selected from the Two Micron All Sky Survey catalogue as targets for the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory 4m Hydra…
Using recent observational data, we construct a set of multi-component equilibrium models of the disk of a Milky Way-like galaxy. The disk dynamics are studied using collisionless-gaseous numerical simulations, based on the joined…
We present a novel interpretation of the previously puzzling different behaviours of stellar populations of the Milky Way's bulge. We first show, by means of pure N-body simulations, that initially co-spatial stellar populations with…
Galaxies with Milky Way-like stellar masses have a wide range of bulge and black hole masses; in turn, these correlate with other properties such as star formation history. While many processes may drive bulge formation, major and minor…
The center of our disk galaxy, the Milky Way, is dominated by a boxy/peanut-shaped bulge. Numerous studies of the bulge based on stellar photometry have concluded that the bulge stars are exclusively old. The perceived lack of young stars…
We use hydrodynamic cosmological zoom-in simulations from the FIRE project to explore the morphologies and kinematics of fifteen Milky Way (MW)-mass galaxies. Our sample ranges from compact, bulge-dominated systems with 90% of their stellar…
The existence of a classical bulge in disk galaxies holds important clue to the assembly history of galaxies. Finding observational evidence of very low mass classical bulges particularly in barred galaxies including our Milky Way, is a…