Related papers: Galaxia: a code to generate a synthetic survey of …
We present a new technique for creating mock catalogues of the individual stars that make up the accreted component of stellar haloes in cosmological simulations and show how the catalogues can be used to test and interpret observational…
We present a statistical method to derive the stellar density profiles of the Milky Way from spectroscopic survey data, taking into account selection effects. We assume that the selection function of the spectroscopic survey is based on…
We develop a new method to account for the finite lifetimes of stars and trace individual abundances within a semi-analytic model of galaxy formation. At variance with previous methods, based on the storage of the (binned) past star…
Dynamically cold stellar streams from tidally dissolved globular clusters (GCs) serve as excellent tools to measure the Galactic mass distribution and show promise to probe the nature of dark matter. For successful application of these…
We present a new theoretical population synthesis model (the Galaxy Model) to examine and deal with large amounts of data from surveys of the Milky Way and to decipher the present and past structure and history of our own Galaxy. We assume…
We introduce a method to infer the vertical distribution of stars in the Milky Way using a Poisson likelihood function, with a view to applying our method to the Gaia catalogue. We show how to account for the sample selection function and…
We present a mock catalog of Milky Way stars, matching in volume and depth the content of the Gaia data release 2 (GDR2). We generated our catalog using Galaxia, a tool to sample stars from a Besancon Galactic model, together with a…
Recent advances from astronomical surveys have revealed spatial, chemical, and kinematical inhomogeneities in the inner region of the stellar halo of the Milky Way Galaxy. In particular, large spectroscopic surveys, combined with Gaia…
We present SynthPop, a new open source, modular population synthesis Galactic modeling software to simulate catalogs of Milky Way stars along any sightline outward from the Sun. Motivated by a lack flexibility in existing Galactic models,…
With Gaia Data Release 2, the astronomical community is entering a new era of multidimensional surveys of the Milky Way. This new phase-space view of our Galaxy demands new tools for comparing observations to simulations of Milky-Way-mass…
Knowledge of ages for stars formed over a galaxy's lifetime is fundamental to understand its formation and evolution. However, stellar ages are difficult to obtain since they cannot be measured from observations, being comparison with…
The formation of galaxies can be understood in terms of the assembly patterns of each type of galactic component. To perform this kind of analysis, is necessary to define some criteria to separate those components. Decomposition methods…
The standard picture of galaxy formation motivates the decomposition of the Milky Way into 3--4 stellar populations with distinct kinematic and elemental abundance distributions: the thin disk, thick disk, bulge, and stellar halo. To test…
A suite of vast stellar surveys mapping the Milky Way, culminating in the Gaia mission, is revolutionizing the empirical information about the distribution and properties of stars in the Galactic stellar disk. We review and lay out what…
We use a series of high-resolution N-body simulations of a `Milky-Way' halo, coupled to semi-analytic techniques, to study the formation of our own Galaxy and of its stellar halo. Our model Milky Way galaxy is a relatively young system…
Mock halo catalogues are indispensable data products for developing and validating cosmological inference pipelines. A major challenge in generating mock catalogues is modelling the halo or galaxy bias, which is the mapping from matter…
Photometric data from the Xuyi Schmidt Telescope Photometric Survey of the Galactic Anticentre (XSTPS-GAC) and the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) are used to derive the global structure parameters of the smooth components of the Milky Way.…
The spatial distribution of Galactic stars with different chemical abundances encodes information on the processes that drove the formation and evolution of the Milky Way. Survey selection functions are indispensable for analysing…
Deep photometric surveys of the Milky Way have revealed diffuse structures encircling our Galaxy far beyond the "classical" limits of the stellar disk. This paper reviews results from our own and other observational programs, which together…
The formation and structure of the Milky Way has a fundamental role in our understanding of the universe and its evolution, and thanks to the Gaia mission and large spectroscopic surveys, we live an exceptional moment of data availability,…