Related papers: A Test for Radial Mixing Using Local Star Samples
Recent work on abundance gradients have focussed not only on their magnitudes, but also on their spatial and temporal variations. In this work, we analyze the behaviour of radial abundance gradients in the galactic disk giving special…
In most studies of dust in galaxies, dust is only detected from its emission to approximately the optical radius of the galaxy. By combining the signal of 110 spiral galaxies observed as part of the Herschel Reference Survey, we are able to…
We analyze the relations between the relative magnesium abundances in stars and their metallicities, Galactic orbital elements, and ages. The relative magnesium abundances in metal-poor ([Fe/H] < -0.4) thin-disk stars have been found to…
We discuss the age of the stellar disks in the solar neighbourhood. After reviewing the various methods for age dating we discuss current estimates of the age of both the thin and the thick disk. We present preliminary results for…
Reconstructing the star formation history (SFH) of disk galaxies is central to understanding their growth and evolution, yet such estimates can be strongly biased by stellar radial migration over cosmic time. Using 186 Milky Way (MW) and…
We investigate the chemical evolution of the Milky Way disc exploring various schemes of recent (last several Gyr) star formation episodes, as reported in recent observational works. We use a semi-analytical model with parametrized radial…
Current understanding of the secular evolution of galactic disks suggests that this process is dominated by two or more heating mechanisms, which increase the random motions of stars in the disk. In particular, the gravitational influence…
As heating processes can broaden the distributions of radial actions and the vertical distributions of the Galactic disks, we investigate the vertical distribution of the Galactic disks as a function of radial action based on Apache Point…
Disk galaxies like the Milky Way are expected to experience gas flows carrying matter toward their centers. This paper investigates the role of these radial gas flows in models of Galactic chemical evolution (GCE). We follow five different…
HST/ACS observations along the major axis of M33 show that the mean age of its stars decreases with increasing distance from the galaxy center. Such a behavior is consistent with an inside-out growth of the disc. However, in the outermost…
Aims. We study the Milky Way thin disk with the Radial Velocity Experiment (RAVE) survey. We consider the thin and thick disks as different Galactic components and present a technique to statistically disentangle the two populations. Then…
Observations of the Milky Way's low-$\alpha$ disk show that at fixed metallicity, [Fe/H], several element abundance, [X/Fe], correlate with age, with unique slopes and small scatters around the age-[X/Fe] relations. In this study, we turn…
We performed a spectroscopic survey of nearly 700 stars probing the galactic thick disc far from the solar neighbourhood towards the galactic coordinates (l~277, b~47). The derived effective temperatures, surface gravities and overall…
I discuss how the chemical abundance distributions, kinematics and age distributions of stars in the thin and thick disks of the Galaxy can be used to decipher the merger history of the Milky Way, a typical large galaxy. The observational…
We have recently identified a previously unknown radial migration mechanism resulting from the overlap of spiral and bar resonances in galactic discs (Minchev & Famaey 2010, Minchev et al. 2010). This new mechanism is much more efficient…
The Yale stellar evolution code has been modified to include the combined effects of diffusion and rotational mixing on $^1$H, $^4$He and the trace elements $^3$He, $^6$Li, $^7$Li, and $^9$Be. The interaction between rotational mixing and…
Radial migration and dynamical heating redistribute stars within galactic discs and thereby modify the chemo-kinematic structure of their host galaxies. Usually, these secular processes are studied in N-body and hydrodynamical simulations…
The radial distributions of the Mg2 and Fe5270 Lick spectral indices have been measured to large radial distances on the disks of NGC 4303 and NGC 4535 using an imaging technique based on interference filters. These data, added to those of…
We study the effect of dissipational gas physics on the vertical heating and thickening of disc galaxies during minor mergers. We produce a suite of minor merger simulations for Milky Way-like galaxies. This suite consists of collisionless…
We study the evolution of oxygen abundance radial gradients as a function of time for the Milky Way Galaxy obtained with our {\sc Mulchem} chemical evolution model. We review the recent data of abundances for different objects observed in…