Related papers: The Stellar Kinematics of Extragalactic Bulges
We summarise some recent results about nearby galactic bulges that are relevant to their formation. We highlight a number of significant advances in our understanding of the surface brightness profiles, stellar populations, and especially…
Despite their paucity, massive hot stars are real cosmic engines of fundamental importance in shaping our Universe, from its very early stages up to its current appearance. Understanding the physics of massive stars is then a key issue for…
Internal dynamical evolution can drive stellar systems into states of high central density. For many star clusters and galactic nuclei, the time scale on which this occurs is significantly less than the age of the universe. As a result,…
The study of the chemical composition of Planetary Nebulae in external galaxies is of paramount importance in the fields of stellar evolution and of the chemical enrichment history of galaxies. In the last years a number of spectroscopic…
The detailed structure of the Galactic bulge still remain uncertain. The strong difficulties of obtaining observations of stars in the Galactic bulge have hindered the acquisition of a kinematic representation for the inner kpc of the Milky…
The Galactic Bulge can uniquely be studied from large samples of individual stars, and is therefore of prime importance for understanding the stellar population structure of bulges in general. Here the observational evidence on the…
This review discusses (i) dynamical methods for determining the masses of Galactic and extragalactic star clusters, (ii) dynamical processes and their time-scales for the evolution of clusters, including evaporation, mass segregation, core…
This chapter summarizes our current understanding of the stellar population properties of bulges and outlines important future research directions.
Globular clusters are large and dense agglomerate of stars. At variance with smaller clusters of stars, they exhibit signs of some chemical evolution. At least for this reason, they are intermediate between open clusters and massive objects…
We compare and contrast the kinematics of various classes of stars, both normal (with M-K spectral types) and peculiar. Numerous plots show the differences in spatial and velocity distributions as well as distributions in kinetic energy vs.…
Globular clusters are stellar dynamical systems which evolve on stellar evolutionary and both internal and external dynamical timescales. Quantitative comparison of cluster properties with realistic evolutionary dynamical models is becoming…
The study of the morphology of galaxies is important in order to understand the formation and evolution of galaxies and their sub-components as a function of luminosity, environment, and star-formation and galaxy assembly over cosmic time.…
Evolved stars dominate galactic spectra, enrich the galactic medium, expand to change their planetary systems, eject winds of a complex nature, produce spectacular nebulae and illuminate them, and transfer material between binary…
We present results for the chemical evolution of the Galactic bulge in the context of an inside-out formation model of the Galaxy. A supernova-driven wind was also included in analogy with elliptical galaxies. New observations of chemical…
Galaxies represent the visible fabric of the Universe and there has been considerable progress recently in both observational and theoretical studies. The underlying goal is to understand the present-day diversity of galaxy forms, masses…
To ascertain whether photometric decompositions of galaxies into bulges and disks are astrophysically meaningful, we have developed a new technique to decompose spectral data cubes into separate bulge and disk components, subject only to…
This paper reviews some recent work on the properties of the outer halos of galaxies. I particularly focus on recent and upcoming advances made with the study of globular clusters. Globular clusters can be observed out to ~100 kpc from the…
Bulges are of different types, morphologies and kinematics, from pseudo-bulges, close to disk properties (Sersic index, rotation fraction, flatenning), to classical de Vaucouleurs bulges, close to elliptical galaxies. Secular evolution and…
This is the first paper presenting our long-term project aimed at studying the nature of bulges through the analysis of their stellar population gradients. We present deep spectroscopic observations along the minor axis and the data…
The last 20 years have seen an explosion in our understanding of the large-scale distribution and motions of galaxies in the nearby universe. The field has moved from a largely qualitative, morphological description of the structures seen…