Related papers: Characterisation of the Galactic thick disk
Present-day disc galaxies often exhibit distinct thin and thick discs. The formation mechanisms of the two discs and the timing of their onset remain open questions. To address these questions, we select edge-on galaxies from flagship JWST…
Deep photometric surveys of the Milky Way have revealed diffuse structures encircling our Galaxy far beyond the "classical" limits of the stellar disk. This paper reviews results from our own and other observational programs, which together…
Studies of elemental abundances in stars belonging to the thin and the thick disk of our Galaxy are reviewed. Edvardsson et al. (1993) found strong evidence of [alpha/Fe] variations among F and G main sequence stars with the same [Fe/H] and…
The Milky Way harbours two disks that appear distinct concerning scale-heights, kinematics, and elemental abundance patterns. Recent years have seen a surge of studies of the elemental abundance trends in the disks using high resolution…
It is widely believed that star clusters form with low star formation efficiencies. With the onset of stellar winds by massive stars or finally when the first super nova blows off, the residual gas is driven out of the embedded star…
We consider the key problems related to measuring the mass of stellar disks and dark halos in galaxies and to explaining the observed properties of disks formed in massive dark halos.
Almost 80 years have passed since Trumpler's analysis of the Galactic open cluster system laid one of the main foundations for understanding the nature and structure of the Milky Way. Since then, the open cluster system has been recognised…
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…
Stellar Populations are the fossil record of Galactic evolution. Interpretation of this record in the Local Group allows one to determine reliably the dominant physics controlling the evolution of those galaxies which are typical of 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…
The Milky Way is a spiral galaxy comprising three main components: the Bulge, the Disk, and the Halo. Of particular interest is the Galactic disk, which holds a significant portion of the baryonic matter angular momentum and harbors at…
Can the present dynamics of spiral galaxies tell us something about the merging history, the formation and evolution of disks? Galaxy interactions thicken or destroy disks; the simultaneous presence of thick and thin disks is a tracer of…
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…
The history of the formation and evolution of the Milky Way Galaxy is found in the spatial distribution, kinematics, age and chemical abundance distributions of long-lived stars. From this fossil record one can in principle extract the star…
Cosmic dust plays a vital role in stellar and galactic formation and evolution, but its three-dimensional structure in the Milky Way has remained unclear due to insufficient precise reddening and distance measurements. Although early…
We examine a possible formation scenario of galactic thick discs with numerical simulations. Thick discs have previously been argued to form in clumpy disc phase in the high-redshift Universe, which host giant clumps of <10^9 M_sun in their…
(Abridged) The building blocks of galaxies are star clusters. These form with low-star formation efficiencies and, consequently, loose a large part of their stars that expand outwards once the residual gas is expelled by the action of the…
Galaxies with Milky Way-like stellar masses have a wide range of bulge and black hole masses; in turn, these correlate with other properties such as star formation history. While many processes may drive bulge formation, major and minor…
The history of the Milky Way Galaxy is written in the properties of its stellar populations. Here we analyse stars observed as part of surveys of local dwarf spheroidal galaxies, but which from their kinematics are highly probable to be…
We have obtained high-resolution spectra and carried out a detailed elemental abundance analysis for a new sample of 899 F and G dwarf stars in the Solar neighbourhood. The results allow us to, in a multi-dimensional space consisting of…