Related papers: Comments on the "Monoceros" affair
Nuclear rings, prevalent in barred galaxies, are essential to understanding gas transport toward galactic nuclei. However, the peculiar nuclear ring in our neighboring galaxy M31 remains poorly understood. Here we present a comprehensive…
This paper presents an equilibrium model of a Milky Way-like spiral galaxy that supports open, mostly 2- and 3-arm spiral patterns but does not form a bar. It is suggested as a more realistic alternative model to that employed by the Agora…
According to the magnetospheric accretion scenario, young low-mass stars are surrounded by circumstellar disks which they interact with through accretion of mass. The accretion builds up the star to its final mass and is also believed to…
The relics of building blocks that made stellar halo and bulge are yet to be discovered unless they were completely disrupted throughout the history of the Galaxy. Here we suggest that about 25% of the Milky Way globular clusters have…
We discuss the existence of a mass-metallicity relation among galactic halo globular clusters. The lack of any luminosity-metallicity correlation in globular cluster systems has been used as an argument against self-enrichment models of…
This chapter presents a review of observational studies to determine the magnetic field in the Milky Way, both in the disk and in the halo, focused on recent developments and on magnetic fields in the diffuse interstellar medium. I discuss…
Galaxies are surrounded by large halos of hot gas which must be replenished as the gas cools. This led Norman & Ikeuchi (1989) to propose the chimney model of the interstellar medium, which predicts that there should be on the order of a…
The formation of galactic discs and the efficiency of star formation within them are issues central to our understanding of galaxy formation. We have developed a detailed and versatile model of disc formation which combines the strengths of…
We raise the question whether in the past a disk could have existed in our Galactic Center which has disappeared now. Our model for the interaction of a cool disk and a hot corona above (Liu et al. 2004) allows to estimate an upper limit…
The presence of spiral structure in isolated galaxies is a problem that has only been partially explained by theoretical models. Because the rate and pattern of star formation in the disk must depend only on mechanisms internal to the disk,…
We have considered polar ring galaxy candidates, the images of which can be found in the SDSS. The sample of 78 galaxies includes the most reliable candidates from the SPRC and PRC catalogs, some of which already have kinematic…
Models of the Sagittarius Stream have consistently found that the Milky Way disc is oriented such that its short axis is along the intermediate axis of the triaxial dark matter halo. We attempt to build models of disc galaxies in such an…
A review on current observations of high-mass star formation is given, with a little bit of theoretical background. Particular emphasis is given to the, in my opinion, most important observations to put strong constraints on models of…
We know that the slope of the radial, stellar light distribution in galaxies is well described by an exponential decline and this distribution is often truncated at a break radius ($R_{br}$). We don't have a clear understanding for the…
Magnetic halos of galaxies are crucial for understanding galaxy evolution, galactic-scale outflows, and feedback from star formation activity. Identifying the magnetised halo of the Milky Way is challenging because of the potential…
In recent years evidence has accumulated that nearby spiral galaxies are surrounded by massive haloes of neutral and ionised gas. These gaseous haloes rotate more slowly than the disks and show inflow motions. They are clearly analogous to…
Since the discovery of the first extra-solar planets, we are confronted with the puzzling diversity of planetary systems. Processes like planet radial migration in gas-disks and planetary orbital instabilities, often invoked to explain the…
I review briefly some dynamical models of structures in the outer parts of disc galaxies, including models of polar rings, tidal tails and bridges. I then discuss the density distribution in the outer parts of discs. For this, I compare…
Recent studies have made the community aware of scattered light when examining low-surface-brightness galaxy features such as thick discs. In our past studies of the thick discs of edge-on galaxies in the Spitzer Survey of Stellar Structure…
The recently discovered, ring-like structure just outside the Galactic disk in Monoceros is detected and traced among 2MASS M giant stars. We have developed a method to recover the signature of this structure from the distance probability…