Related papers: The Galaxy in Context: Structural, Kinematic and I…
The inner $\sim5$ kiloparsec (kpc) region of the Milky Way is complex. Unravelling the evolution of the Galaxy requires precise understanding of the formation of this region. We report a study focused on disentangling the inner Galaxy ($r <…
We live in an age where an enormous amount of astrometric, photometric, asteroseismic, and spectroscopic data of Milky Way stars are being acquired, many orders of magnitude larger than about a decade ago. Thanks to the Gaia astrometric…
Stellar-mass black holes (BHs), with masses comparable to stars, are a major constituent of our Milky Way galaxy. This chapter describes the landscape of challenging, and long-sought efforts to identify these objects in the Galaxy. The…
We use hydrodynamic cosmological zoom-in simulations from the FIRE project to explore the morphologies and kinematics of fifteen Milky Way (MW)-mass galaxies. Our sample ranges from compact, bulge-dominated systems with 90% of their stellar…
In this work we introduce the curvature of a galaxy brightness profile to identify its structural subcomponents in a non-parametrically fashion. Bulges, bars, disks, lens, rings and spiral arms are key to understand the formation and…
We review our current understanding of the internal dynamical properties of the dwarf spheroidal galaxies surrounding the Milky Way. These are the most dark matter dominated galaxies, and as such may be considered ideal laboratories to test…
We investigate the possibility of describing the spiral pattern of the Milky Way in terms of a model of superposition 2- and 4-armed wave harmonics (the simplest description, besides pure modes). Two complementary methods are used: a study…
What galaxy lives in what halo? The answer to this simple question holds important information regarding galaxy formation and evolution. We describe a new statistical technique to link galaxies to their dark matter haloes, or light to mass,…
Galaxies, in particular disc galaxies, contain a number of structures and substructures with well defined morphological, photometric and kinematic properties. Considerable theoretical effort has been put into explaining their formation and…
We consider the possible pattern of the overall spiral structure of the Galaxy, using data on the distribution of neutral (atomic), molecular, and ionized hydrogen, on the base of the hypothesis of the spiral structure being symmetric, i.e.…
The aim of Galactic Archaeology is to recover the evolutionary history of the Milky Way from its present day kinematical and chemical state. Because stars move away from their birth sites, the current dynamical information alone is not…
We analyse a sample of 52,000 Milky Way (MW) type galaxies drawn from the publicly available galaxy catalogue of the Millennium Simulation with the aim of studying statistically the differences and similarities of their properties in…
(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…
The dense molecular gas is the ideal tracer of the spiral structure in the Milky Way, and should be used intensively to solve the puzzle of its structure. In spite of our position inside the plane, we can hope to disentangle the structures,…
Most of the visible mass in a typical spiral galaxy is distributed in a thin disk, with a radial extent much larger than its thickness. While the planar disk structure, including non-axisymmetric features such as spiral structure, has been…
We examine the chemical and dynamical structure in the solar neighbourhood of a model Galaxy that is the endpoint of a simulation of the chemical evolution of the Milky Way in the presence of radial mixing of stars and gas. Although the…
The innermost regions of most galaxies are characterised by the presence of extremely dense nuclear star clusters. Nevertheless, these clusters are not the only stellar component present in galactic nuclei, where larger stellar structures…
The assembly process of our Galaxy can be retrieved using the motions and chemistry of individual stars. Chemo-dynamical studies of the nearby halo have long hinted at the presence of multiple components such as streams, clumps, duality and…
The centre of the Milky Way is occupied by a nuclear star cluster, which contains the supermassive black hole Sgr A*. The cluster is embedded in the larger surrounding nuclear stellar disc. These three components dominate the mass budget of…
Our vision of galaxies has changed significantly since the era of large galaxy surveys like the Sloan, which gave us extensive statistics with millions of galaxies. The Hubble sequence classification described in Chapter 1 still remains…