Related papers: The Galactic thin and thick disk
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…
Using the IRAS Infrared Sky Survey Atlas, we have made 60 x 60 deg mosaics of the far-infrared emission in the Milky Way. By applying a median normalizing spatial filter, we were able to eliminate the strong gradient in brightness towards…
The Milky Way (MW) is surrounded by numerous satellite objects: dwarf galaxies, globular clusters and streams of disrupted systems. Together, these form a vast polar structure (VPOS), a thin plane spreading to Galactocentric distances as…
We present a detailed analysis of the Galaxy structure using an unWISE wide-field image at $3.4\mu$m. We perform a 3D photometric decomposition of the Milky Way taking into account i) the projection of the Galaxy on the celestial sphere and…
The magnetic field structure of the Milky Way can offer critical insights into the origin of galactic magnetic fields. Measurements of magnetic structures of the Milky Way are still sparse in far regions of the Galactic disk and halo.…
The formation and evolution of the Milky Way's disc, bar, and bulge remain fundamentally limited by the lack of a contiguous, Galaxy-wide, high-precision chemo-dynamical map. Key open questions - including the survival or destruction of the…
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…
Stars and their kinematics provide one of the tools available for studies of the shapes of galaxies and their halos. In this review I focus on two specific applications: the shape of the Milky Way dark halo and the shape of the LMC disk.…
Studies of nearby galaxies including the Milky Way have provided fundamental information on the evolution of structure in the Universe, the existence and nature of dark matter, the origin and evolution of galaxies, and the global features…
Solid insight into the physics of the inner Milky Way is key to understanding our Galaxy's evolution, but extreme dust obscuration has historically hindered efforts to map the area along the Galactic mid-plane. New comprehensive…
The surroundings of globular clusters in the outer halo are one of the best places to look for the remnants of ancient dwarf satellites. The classical Searle & Zinn (1978) scenario of the formation of the Milky Way, in which the halo…
Recent observations show that spiral galaxies are surrounded by extended gaseous halos as predicted by the hierarchical structure formation scenario. The origin and nature of extraplanar gas is often unclear since the halo is continuously…
General structural properties and low surface brightness tidal features hold important clues to the formation of galaxies. In this paper, we study a sample of polar-ring galaxies (PRGs) based on optical imaging from the Sloan Digital Sky…
We review observational evidence bearing on the formation of a prototypical large spiral galaxy, the Milky Way. New ground- and space-based studies of globular star clusters and dwarf spheroidal galaxies provide a wealth of information to…
The hierarchical theory of galaxy formation rests on the idea that smaller galactic structures merge to form the galaxies that we see today. The past decade has provided remarkable observational support for this scenario, driven in part by…
The long term goal of large-scale chemical tagging is to use stellar elemental abundances as a tracer of dispersed substructures of the Galactic disk. The identification of such lost stellar aggregates and the exploration of their chemical…
Using N-body simulations of the Galactic disks, we qualitatively study how the metallicity distributions of the thick and thin disk stars are modified by radial mixing induced by the bar and spiral arms. We show that radial mixing drives a…
Recent years have seen a series of large-scale photometric surveys with the aim of detecting substructure in nearby dwarf galaxies. Some of these objects display a varying distribution of each stellar population, reflecting their star…
Gas-rich dwarf and disk galaxies overlap in numerous physical quantities that make their classification subjective. We report the discovery of a separation between dwarfs and disks into two unique sequences in the mass (luminosity) versus…
The study of the Milky Way structure is vital importance for a better understanding of the universe. This study digs deeper into the structure of Milky Way Galaxys with emphasis to its spiral arms. Multiple data sources were sought…