Related papers: Hiding its age: the case for a younger bulge
The Galactic bulge, that is the prominent out-of-plane over-density present in the inner few kiloparsecs of the Galaxy, is a complex structure, as the morphology, kinematics, chemistry and ages of its stars indicate. To understand the…
Contrary to traditional models of galaxy formation, recent observations suggest that some bulges form within preexisting disk galaxies. Such late-epoch bulge formation within disks seems to be linked to disk gas inflow and central star…
We combine stellar metallicity and stellar mass estimates for a large sample of galaxies drawn from the SDSS DR2 spanning wide ranges in physical properties, in order to derive an inventory of the total mass of metals and baryons locked up…
Over the last few years, many studies have found an empirical relationship between the abundance of a star and its age. Here we estimate spectroscopic stellar ages for 178 825 red-giant stars observed by the APOGEE survey with a median…
(ABBREVIATED:) The large majority of extragalactic star cluster studies done to date have essentially used two or three-passband aperture photometry, combined with theoretical stellar population synthesis models, to obtain age, mass and…
NGC 6791 is an old, metal-rich star cluster normally considered to be a disk open cluster. Its red giant branch is broad in color yet, to date, there is no evidence for a metallicity spread among its stars. The turnoff region of the main…
I discuss the age and helium abundance of the Galactic bulge stellar population. I present examples as to how age and helium abundance can be degenerate observationally, and thus, how unstated assumptions of the helium-metallicity relation…
Observations of (B-V) colour distributions towards the galactic poles are compared with those obtained from synthetic colour-magnitude diagrams to determine the major constituents in the disc and spheroid. The disc is described with four…
We present photometry and long-slit spectroscopy for 12 S0 and spiral galaxies selected from the Catalogue of Isolated Galaxies. The structural parameters of the sample galaxies are derived from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey i-band images by…
We report the first detections of Blue Straggler Stars (BSS) in the bulge of the Milky Way galaxy. Proper motions from extensive space-based observations along a single sight-line allow us to separate a sufficiently clean and…
The characteristics of the stellar populations in the Galactic Bulge inform and constrain the Milky Way's formation and evolution. The metal-poor population is particularly important in light of cosmological simulations, which predict that…
We infer the ages of three young stellar clusters, NGC 2004, NGC 7419, and NGC 2100, using Stellar Ages, a statistical algorithm designed to infer stellar population properties from color magnitude diagrams. Recent studies have revealed…
Scaling from the empirical metal yield as measured in clusters of galaxies, it is inferred that early in the evolution of the Galaxy the bulge stellar population has produced $\sim 10^9\msun$ of metals, at least 5 times more than the total…
The measurement of the structure of stellar populations in the Milky Way disk places fundamental constraints on models of galaxy formation and evolution. Previously, the disk's structure has been studied in terms of populations defined…
Panoramic spectroscopic data of the sample of 80 nearby lenticular galaxies obtained with the Multi-Pupil Fiber Spectrograph of the 6-m telescope are presented. The SSP-equivalent ages, [Z/H], and [Mg/Fe] are determined through the Lick…
(ABRIDGED) We assess the systematic uncertainties in (young) cluster age, mass, and - to a lesser extent - extinction and metallicity determinations, based on broad-band imaging observations with the Hubble Space Telescope. Our aim here is…
The present paper presents a tabulation of data on all 600 Galactic open clusters for which it is presently possible to calculate linear diameters. As expected, the youngest `clusters' with ages < 15 Myr, contain a significant (greater than…
(abridged) Thus far our impressions regarding the evolutionary time scales for young circumstellar disks have been based on small number statistics. Over the past decade, however, in addition to precision study of individual star/disk…
The metal-poor stars in the bulge are important relics of the Milky Way's formation history, as simulations predict that they are some of the oldest stars in the Galaxy. In order to determine if they are truly ancient stars, we must…
Long slit spectra recorded with GMOS on Gemini South are used to examine the star-forming history of the lenticular galaxy NGC 5102. Structural and supplemental photometric information are obtained from archival Spitzer [3.6] images.…