Related papers: Thick disk kinematics from RAVE and the solar moti…

We report new constraints on the local escape speed of our Galaxy. Our analysis is based on a sample of high velocity stars from the RAVE survey and two previously published datasets. We use cosmological simulations of disk galaxy formation…

Nearly 400 Tycho-2 stars have been observed in a 720 square degree field in the direction of the North Galactic Pole with the high resolution echelle spectrograph ELODIE. Absolute magnitudes, effective temperatures, gravities and…

We present a method to characterize statistically the parameters of a detached binary sample - binary fraction, separation distribution, and mass ratio distribution - using noisy radial-velocity data with as few as two, randomly spaced,…

The new data release (DR5) of the RAdial Velocity Experiment (RAVE) includes radial velocities of 520,781 spectra of 457,588 individual stars, of which 215,590 individual stars are released in the Tycho-Gaia astrometric solution (TGAS) in…

We present the results from our deep optical imaging survey \mu_lim=26-27 V-mag/arcsec^2 of a morphologically selected sample of 72 edge-on disk galaxies. The question of the global structure of galactic stellar disks, especially the radial…

Different stellar sub-populations of the Milky Way's stellar disk are known to have different vertical scale heights, their thickness increasing with age. Using SEGUE spectroscopic survey data, we have recently shown that mono-abundance…

We present the kinematics of a sample of 398 DA white dwarfs from the SPY project (ESO SN Ia Progenitor surveY) and discuss kinematic criteria for distinguishing thin-disk, thick-disk, and halo populations. This is the largest homogeneous…

RAVE (RAdial Velocity Experiment) is an ambitious program to conduct an all-sky survey (complete to V = 16) to measure the radial velocities, metallicities and abundance ratios of 50 million stars using the 1.2-m UK Schmidt Telescope of the…

We study the chemical evolution of the thick and thin discs of the Galaxy by comparing detailed chemical evolution models with recent data from the AMBRE Project. The data suggest that the stars in the thick and thin discs form two distinct…

Full space velocities are computed for a sample of 130 nearby RR Lyrae variables using both ground-based and Hipparcos proper motions. In many cases proper motions from multiple sources have been averaged to produce a significant…

Context. Stellar migration of the galactic disc stars has been invoked to explain the dispersion of stellar metallicity observed in the solar neighborhood. Aims. We seek to identify the dynamical mechanisms underlying stellar migration in…

We use samples of local main-sequence stars to show that the radial gradient of [Fe/H] in the thin disk of the Milky Way decreases with mean effective stellar temperature. Many of these stars are visiting the solar neighborhood from the…

We trace the evolution of eight edge-on star-forming disk galaxies by analyzing stellar population properties of their thin and thick disks. These galaxies have relatively low stellar masses (4~$\times$~10$^9$ to…

We consider a thickness of stellar disks of late-type galaxies by analyzing the R and K_s band photometric profiles for two independent samples of edge-on galaxies. The main goal is to verify a hypotesis that a thickness of old stellar…

Based on high-resolution spectra obtained with the MIKE spectrograph on the Magellan telescopes we present detailed elemental abundances for 64 red giant stars in the inner and outer Galactic disk. For the inner disk sample (4-7 kpc from…

The Radial Velocity Experiment (RAVE) is a large wide-field spectroscopic stellar survey of the Milky Way. Over the period 2003-2013, 574,630 spectra for 483,330 stars have been amassed at a resolution of R=7500 in the Ca-triplet region of…

We present new proper motions from the 10 m Keck telescopes for a puzzling population of massive, young stars located within 3.5" (0.14 pc) of the supermassive black hole at the Galactic Center. Our proper motion measurements have…

We perform numerical simulations of a stellar galactic disk with initial conditions chosen to represent an unrelaxed population which might have been left following a merger. Stars are unevenly distributed in radial action angle, though the…

We study the shape of the thick disc using photometric data at high and intermediate latitudes from SDSS and 2MASS surveys. We use the population synthesis approach using an ABC-MCMC method to characterize the thick disc shape, scale…

We describe a novel framework to model galaxy spectra with two cospatial stellar populations, such as may represent a bulge & bar or thick & thin disc, and apply it to APOGEE spectra in the inner $\sim$2 kpc of M31, as well as to stacked…