Related papers: Galactic Archaeology and Minimum Spanning Trees
The LAMOST survey has acquired low-resolution spectra (R=1,800) for 5 million stars across the Milky Way, far more than any current stellar survey at a corresponding or higher spectral resolution. It is often assumed that only very few…
We describe a novel method for determining the demographics of a population of star clusters, for example distributions of cluster mass and age, from unresolved photometry. This method has a number of desirable properties: it fully exploits…
Molecular phylogenetic techniques do not generally account for such common evolutionary events as site insertions and deletions (known as indels). Instead tree building algorithms and ancestral state inference procedures typically rely on…
Identification of chemically similar stars using elemental abundances is core to many pursuits within Galactic archaeology. However, measuring the chemical likeness of stars using abundances directly is limited by systematic imprints of…
Context. Recent evidences from spectroscopic surveys point towards the presence of a metal-poor, young stellar population in the chemical thin disk. In this context, the investigation of the spatial distribution and time evolution of…
Galactic archeology based on star counts is instrumental to reconstruct the past mass assembly of Local Group galaxies. The development of new observing techniques and data-reduction, coupled with the use of sensitive large field of view…
Cosmological surveys must correct their observations for the reddening of extragalactic objects by Galactic dust. Existing dust maps, however, have been found to have spatial correlations with the large-scale structure of the Universe.…
We present the analysis of deep colour-magnitude diagrams (CMDs) of 6 stellar fields in the LMC. The data were obtained using HST/WFPC2 in the I and V filters, reaching V=26.5. We discuss and apply a method of correcting CMDs for…
Large spectroscopic surveys aim to consistently compute stellar parameters of very diverse stars while minimizing systematic errors. We explore the use of stellar clusters as benchmarks to verify the precision of spectroscopic parameters in…
Chemically tagging groups of stars born in the same birth cluster is a major goal of spectroscopic surveys. To investigate the feasibility of such strong chemical tagging, we perform a blind chemical tagging experiment on abundances…
Nearby dwarf galaxies are local analogues of high-redshift and metal-poor stellar populations. Most of these systems ceased star formation long ago, but they retain signatures of their past that can be unraveled by detailed study of their…
From a volume limited sample of 45,542 galaxies and 6,000 groups with $z \leq 0.213$ we use an adapted minimal spanning tree algorithm to identify and classify large scale structures within the Galaxy and Mass Assembly (GAMA) survey. Using…
The full spatio-chemo-dynamical structure of galaxies of all types and environments at low redshift provides a critical accompaniment to observations of galaxy formation at high redshift. The next decade brings the observational opportunity…
The early science results from the new generation of high-resolution stellar spectroscopic surveys, such as GALAH and the Gaia-ESO survey, will represent major milestones in the quest to chemically tag the Galaxy. Yet this technique to…
As part of the SLUGGS survey, we stack 1137 Keck DEIMOS spectra of globular clusters from 10 galaxies to study their stellar populations in detail. The stacked spectra have median signal to noise ratios of $\sim 90$ \AA$^{-1}$. Besides the…
One important key in understanding a galaxy's evolution is to study the consequences of its past dynamical interactions that influenced its shape. By measuring the metallicity distribution of stellar populations with different ages, one can…
We study the relationship between the field star formation and cluster formation properties in a large sample of nearby dwarf galaxies. We use optical data from the Hubble Space Telescope and from ground-based telescopes to derive the ages…
A central challenge in observational studies of galaxy formation is how to associate progenitor galaxies with their descendants at lower redshifts. One promising approach is to link galaxies at fixed number density, rather than fixed…
The abundance of galaxy clusters in the low-redshift universe provides an important cosmological test, constraining a product of the initial amplitude of fluctuations and the amount by which they have grown since early times. The degeneracy…
Thin galactic discs and nuclear stellar discs (NSDs) are fragile structures that can be easily disturbed by merger events. By studying the age of the stellar populations in present-day discs, we can learn about the assembly history of…