Related papers: Comments on the "Monoceros" affair

Thanks to their usefulness in various fields of astrophysics (e.g. mixing processes in stars, chemical evolution of galaxies), the last few years have witnessed a large increase in the amount of abundance data for early-type stars. Two…

Galactic disks lie at the heart of many of the most pressing astrophysical puzzles. There are sophisticated kinetic theories that describe some aspects of galaxy disk dynamics, but extracting quantitative predictions from those theories has…

We present first results from a spectroscopic survey of 2000 F/G stars 0.5--5kpc from the Galactic plane, obtained with the 2dF facility on the AAT. These data show the mean rotation velocity of the thick disk about the Galactic center a…

The trans-Neptunian scattered disk exhibits unexpected dynamical structure, ranging from an extended dispersion of perihelion distance to a clustered distribution in orbital angles. Self-gravitational modulation of the scattered disk has…

According to our current cosmological model, galaxies like the Milky Way are expected to experience many mergers over their lifetimes. The most massive of the merging galaxies will be dragged towards the disc-plane, depositing stars and…

We analyse the phase-space structure of simulated thick discs that are the result of a significant merger between a disc galaxy and a satellite. Our main goal is to establish what would be the characteristic imprints of a merger origin for…

The canonical picture of star formation involves disk-mediated accretion, with Keplerian accretion disks and associated bipolar jets primarily observed in nearby, low-mass young stellar objects (YSOs). Recently, rotating gaseous structures…

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…

In the last talk of the conference I summarized the main progress and contributions to high energy astrophysics made by studies of microquasars in our Galaxy. To stimulate the general discussion I have underlined some of the questions that…

Spiral galaxies, including the Milky Way, have large-scale magnetic fields with significant energy densities. The dominant theory attributes these magnetic fields to a large-scale dynamo. We review the current status of dynamo theory and…

Of the 21 known gaseous debris discs around white dwarfs, a large fraction of them display observational features that are well described by an eccentric distribution of gas. In the absence of embedded objects or additional forces, these…

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,…

A strong case has been made that radio waves from sources within about half a degree of the Galactic Center undergo extreme diffractive scattering. However, problems arise when standard (``Kolmogorov'') models of electron density…

I review the basis and limitations of plausible inference in cosmology, in particular the limitation that it can only provide fundamentally true inferences when the hypotheses under consideration form a set that is exhaustive. They never…

I give a brief overview of recent results from self-consistent modeling of electron-positrons cascades in pulsar polar caps. These results strongly suggest that the pulsar magnetosphere is a more complex system than was assumed before.

In this comment we question some arguments presented in astro-ph/0512048 to refuse the presence of an singular mass surface layer. In particular, incorrect expressions are used for the disk's surface mass density. We also point out that the…

I argue that the weight of the available evidence favours the conclusions that galaxies are unbiased tracers of mass, the mean mass density (excluding a cosmological constant or its equivalent) is less than the critical Einstein-de Sitter…

We present evidence to support an earlier indication that the Galaxy is embedded in an extended, highly inclined, triaxial halo outlined by the spatial distribution of companion galaxies to the Milky Way. Signatures of this spatial…

On the basis of a recent cosmological model, the puzzle of galactic rotational velocities at their edges is explained without invoking dark matter. A rationale for the existence of structures like galaxies and superclusters is also…

A review on current theories and observations of high-mass star formation is given. Particularly the influence of magnetic fields and feedback mechanisms, and of varying initial conditions on theories are discussed. The, in my biased view,…