Related papers: The Galaxy in Context: Structural, Kinematic and I…
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…
The Milky Way is often considered to be the best example of a spiral for which the dark matter not only dominates the outer kinematics, but also plays a major dynamical role in the inner galaxy: the Galactic disk is therefore said to be…
Globular clusters are compact, gravitationally bound systems of up to a million stars. The GCs in the Milky Way contain some of the oldest stars known, and provide important clues to the early formation and continuing evolution of our…
APOGEE and Gaia data have revealed that the Milky Way's structure appears to have evolved through three distinct kinematic phases. First, at early cosmic times, the Milky Way was a disordered protogalaxy, which subsequently "spun up" to a…
The knowledge of the intrinsic three-dimensional (3D) structure of galaxy components provides crucial information about the physical processes driving their formation and evolution. In this paper I discuss the main developments and results…
We present evidence to support an earlier indication that the Galaxy is embedded in an extended, highly inclined, triaxial halo outlined by the spatial distribution of companion galaxies to the Milky Way. Signatures of this spatial…
The Milky Way's inner region is dominated by a stellar bar and a boxy-peanut shaped bulge. However, which stellar populations inhabit the inner Galaxy or how star formation proceeded there is still unknown. The difficulty in studying these…
The formation of our Milky Way can be parsed qualitatively into different phases that resulted in its structurally different stellar populations: the halo and the disk components. Revealing a quantitative overall picture of the Galactic…
Our understanding of the Milky Way disk is rapidly improving with the recent advent of the high quality and vast amount of observational data. We summarize our current view of the structure of the Milky Way disk, such as the masses and…
The growing trove of precision astrometric observations from the Gaia space telescope and other surveys is revealing the structure and dynamics of the Milky Way in ever more exquisite detail. We summarize the current status of our…
The center of our disk galaxy, the Milky Way, is dominated by a boxy/peanut-shaped bulge. Numerous studies of the bulge based on stellar photometry have concluded that the bulge stars are exclusively old. The perceived lack of young stars…
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…
A suite of vast stellar surveys mapping the Milky Way, culminating in the Gaia mission, is revolutionizing the empirical information about the distribution and properties of stars in the Galactic stellar disk. We review and lay out what…
Galaxies are complex systems the evolution of which apparently results from the interplay of dynamics, star formation, chemical enrichment, and feedback from supernova explosions and supermassive black holes. The hierarchical theory of…
The Gaia mission has triggered major developments in the field of Galactic dynamics in recent years, which we discuss in this review. The structure and kinematics of all Galactic components - disc, bar/bulge and halo - are now mapped in…
The formation and evolution of galaxies is one of the great outstanding problems of astrophysics. Within the broad context of hierachical structure formation, we have only a crude picture of how galaxies like our own came into existence. A…
Using observational data on the kinematical properties and density distributions of the subsystems of the Milky Way galaxy, we construct a set of multi-component equilibrium models of its disk. The dynamics of the disk is studied…
The relics of building blocks that made stellar halo and bulge are yet to be discovered unless they were completely disrupted throughout the history of the Galaxy. Here we suggest that about 25% of the Milky Way globular clusters have…
The formation and evolution of the Milky Way's disc, bar, and bulge remain fundamentally limited by the lack of a contiguous, Galaxy-wide, high-precision chemo-dynamical map. Key open questions - including the survival or destruction of the…
A growing number of low luminosity and low surface brightness astronomical objects challenge traditional notions of both galaxies and star clusters. To address this, we propose a definition of galaxy independent of the cold dark matter…