Related papers: Thick disk kinematics from RAVE and the solar moti…
We study the vertical stellar distribution of the Milky Way thin disk in detail with particular focus on the outer disk. We treat the galactic disk as a gravitationally coupled, three-component system consisting of stars, atomic hydrogen…
The Milky Way serves as a template for understanding the formation and evolution of late-type massive disk galaxies since we can obtain detailed chemical and kinematic information for large samples of individual stars. However, the early…
We apply the method of Burnett & Binney (2010) for the determination of stellar distances and parameters to the internal catalogue of the Radial Velocity Experiment (Steinmetz et al. 2006). Subsamples of stars that either have Hipparcos…
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…
We present a survey of the mass surface-density of spiral disks, motivated by outstanding uncertainties in rotation-curve decompositions. Our method exploits integral-field spectroscopy to measure stellar and gas kinematics in nearly…
Multi-object spectrographs have opened a new window on the analyses of the chemo-dynamical properties of old Milky Way stars. These analyses allow us to trace back the internal mechanisms and the external factors that have influenced the…
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…
This paper presents an investigation of the outer disk structure by using data from a recent release of the 2 micron sky survey (2MASS). This 2MASS data show unambiguously that the stellar disk thickens with increasing distance from the…
The rotation curve of the Galaxy is generally thought to be flat. However, using radial velocities from interstellar molecular clouds, which is common in rotation curve determination, seems to be incorrect and may lead to incorrectly…
[Abridged] In this first paper of this series, we present a new approach for studying the chemo-dynamical evolution in disk galaxies, which consists of fusing disk chemical evolution models with compatible numerical simulations of galactic…
Within a cosmological hydrodynamical simulation, we form a disc galaxy with sub- components which can be assigned to a thin stellar disc, thick disk, and a low mass stellar halo via a chemical decomposition. The thin and thick disc…
The upcoming LISA mission offers the unique opportunity to study the Milky Way through gravitational wave radiation from Galactic binaries. Among the variety of Galactic gravitational wave sources, LISA is expected to individually resolve…
Thick disks appear to be common in external large spiral galaxies and our own Milky Way also hosts one. The existence of a thick disk is possibly directly linked to the formation history of the host galaxy and if its properties is known it…
Most of the visible mass in a typical spiral galaxy is distributed in a thin disk, with a radial extent much larger than its thickness. While the planar disk structure, including non-axisymmetric features such as spiral structure, has been…
We analyze high quality abundances data of solar neighborhood stars and show that there are two distinct regimes of [alpha/Fe] versus age which we identify as the epochs of the thick and thin disk formation. A tight correlation between…
We analyze a new kinematic survey that includes accurate proper motions derived from SDSS DR7 positions, combined with multi-epoch measurements from the GSC-II database. By means of the SDSS spectro-photometric data (effective temperature,…
The stellar disc kinematics in a sample of fifteen intermediate- to late-type edge-on spiral galaxies are studied using a dynamical modeling technique. The sample covers a substantial range in maximum rotation velocity and deprojected…
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…
We suggest and verify a new photometric method enabling derivation of relative thickness of a galactic disk from two-dimensional surface-brightness distribution of the galaxy in the plane of the sky. The method is applied to images of 45…
Thick disks are a prevalent feature observed in numerous disk galaxies including our own Milky Way. Their significance has been reported to vary widely, ranging from a few to 100% of the disk mass, depending on the galaxy and the…