Related papers: The Milky Way has no thick disk
Thick disks are faint and extended stellar components found around several disk galaxies including our Milky Way. The Milky Way thick disk, the only one studied in detail, contains mostly old disk stars (~10 Gyr), so that thick disks are…
We discuss recent observations of stars located close to the symmetry plane of the Milky Way, and examine them in the context of theories of Galaxy formation and evolution. The kinematics, ages, and compositions of thin disk stars in the…
The stellar density distribution of the bulge is analyzed through one of its tracers. We use oxygen-rich Miras variables from the Catchpole et al. (2016) survey and OGLE-III survey as standard candles. The average age of these stars is…
The radial profiles of the Hb, Mg, and Fe line-strength indices are presented for a sample of eight spiral galaxies with a low surface-brightness stellar disc and a bulge. The correlations between the central values of the line-strength…
Studies of stellar populations, understood to mean collections of stars with common spatial, kinematic, chemical, and/or age distributions, have been reinvigorated during the last decade by the advent of large-area sky surveys such as SDSS,…
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…
The Galactic disk is one of the main components of the Milky Way, which contributes most of the luminosity. Its structure is essential for understanding the formation and evolution of the Milky Way. Using 174,443 K-type dwarf stars observed…
We test competing models that aim at explaining the nature of stars in the Milky Way that are well away (|z|$\gtrsim$ 1kpc) from the midplane, the so-called thick disk: the stars may have gotten there through orbital migration, through…
The J-Ks color distribution (CD) with a bin size of 0.05 magnitude for the entire Milky Way has been carried out by using the Two Micron All Sky Survey Point Source Catalog (2MASS PSC). The CDs are bimodal, which has a red peak at 0.8 <…
We have obtained high-resolution, high signal-to-noise spectra for 899 F and G dwarf stars in the Solar neighbourhood. The stars were selected on the basis of their kinematic properties to trace the thin and thick discs, the Hercules…
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 present a detailed determination and analysis of 3D stellar mass distribution of the Galactic disk for mono-age populations using a sample of 0.93 million main-sequence turn-off and subgiant stars from the LAMOST Galactic Surveys. Our…
We compile observations of the surface mass density profiles of dense stellar systems, including globular clusters in the Milky Way and nearby galaxies, massive star clusters in nearby starbursts, nuclear star clusters in dwarf spheroidals…
The abundances of iron and oxygen are homogeneously determined in a sample of 523 nearby (d<150 pc) FGK disk and halo stars with metallicities in the range -1.5<[Fe/H]<0.5. The oxygen abundances were inferred from a restricted non-LTE…
Abridged: We estimate the distances to ~48 million stars detected by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and map their 3D number density distribution in 100 < D < 20 kpc range over 6,500 deg^2 of sky. The data show strong evidence for a Galaxy…
Recent observational studies have uncovered a small number of very metal-poor stars with cold kinematics in the Galactic disc and bulge. However, their origins remain enigmatic. We select a total of 138 Milky Way (MW) analogs from the TNG50…
We predict that there is a population of low-luminosity dwarf galaxies orbiting within the halo of the Milky Way that have surface brightnesses low enough to have escaped detection in star-count surveys. The overall count of stealth…
One of the Milky Way's characteristic features is a strongly bimodal distribution of $\alpha$-process elements, such as Mg, at fixed [Fe/H] in stellar abundances. We examine patterns in [Mg/Fe] versus [Fe/H] in FIRE-2 simulations of Milky…
Despite the recent advancements in the field of galaxy formation and evolution, fully self-consistent simulations are still unable to make the detailed predictions necessary for the planned and ongoing large spectroscopic and photometry…
We characterise the radial density, metallicity and flattening profile of the Milky Way's stellar halo, based on the large sample of 1757 spectroscopically confirmed giant stars from SDSS/SEGUE-2 after excising stars that were…