Related papers: Galactic Archaeology and Minimum Spanning Trees
The Milky Way has accreted many ultra-faint dwarf galaxies (UFDs), and stars from these galaxies can be found throughout our Galaxy today. Studying these stars provides insight into galaxy formation and early chemical enrichment, but…
The phase-space structure of our Galaxy holds the key to understand and reconstruct its formation. The Lambda-CDM model predicts a richly structured phase-space distribution of dark matter and (halo) stars, consisting of streams of…
The role that minor mergers have played in the formation and structure of the Milky Way is still an open question, about which there is much debate. We use numerical simulations to explore the evolution of debris from a tidally disrupted…
The aims are to investigate the clustering of the far-infrared sources from the Herschel infrared Galactic Plane Survey (Hi-GAL) in the Galactic longitude range of -71 to 67 deg. These clumps, and their spatial distribution, are an imprint…
Context. The analysis of luminosity and mass distributions of young stellar clusters is essential to understanding the star-formation process. However, the gas and dust left over by this process extinct the light of the newborn stars and…
The minimum spanning tree (MST), a graph constructed from a distribution of points, draws lines between pairs of points so that all points are linked in a single skeletal structure that contains no loops and has minimal total edge length.…
Chemical tagging is a central pursuit of galactic archaeology, but requires sufficiently discriminative abundances to uniquely identify sites of star formation. This task is complicated by intrinsic scatter among conatal stars,…
One of the generic predictions of modern cosmological models is that large galaxies should have experienced many mergers with smaller galaxies at some point in their past. Debris from such encounters will leave spatially distinct…
The identification of stellar structures in the Galactic halo, including stellar streams and merger remnants, often relies on the dynamics of their constituent stars. However, this approach has limitations due to the complex dynamical…
Cosmological studies of large-scale structure have relied on two-point statistics, not fully exploiting the rich structure of the cosmic web. In this paper we show how to capture some of this cosmic web information by using the minimum…
Stars born from the same molecular cloud should be nearly homogeneous in their element abundances. The concept of chemical tagging is to identify members of disrupted clusters by their clustering in element abundance space. Chemical tagging…
Galactic Archaeology, i.e. the use of chemo-dynamical information for stellar samples covering large portions of the Milky Way to infer the dominant processes involved in its formation and evolution, is now a powerful method thanks to the…
We present and discuss a method to identify substructures in combined angular-redshift samples of galaxies within Clusters. The method relies on the use of Discrete Wavelet Transform (hereafter DWT) and has already been applied to the…
We use the unprecedented resolution and depth of the JWST NIRCam Early Release Observations at 1-5 $\mu$m to study the stellar mass, age, and metallicity of compact star clusters in the neighborhood of the host galaxies in the SMACS…
The projected distribution of stars in the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC) from the Magellanic Clouds Photometric Survey is analysed. Stars of different ages are selected via criteria based on V magnitude and V-I colour, and the degree of…
Open star clusters are the essential building blocks of the Galactic disk; "strong chemical tagging" - the premise that all star clusters can be reconstructed given chemistry information alone - is a driving force behind many current and…
The aim of Galactic archaeology is to recover the history of our Galaxy through the information encoded in stars. An unprobed assumption of this field is that the chemical composition of a star is an immutable marker of the gas from which…
Phylogenetic methods, traditionally used in biology to trace the evolutionary relationships among species, are emerging as a powerful framework to reconstruct evolutionary processes in galaxies from chemical information. We apply galactic…
With modern large scale spectroscopic surveys, such as the SDSS and LSS-GAC, Galactic astronomy has entered the era of millions of stellar spectra. Taking advantage of the huge spectroscopic database, we propose to use a "standard pair"…
Traditional studies of stellar clusters in external galaxies use surface photometry and therefore focus on systems that are still bright and compact enough to be separated from the stellar background. Consequently, the latter stages of…