Related papers: Modelling the Milky Way's globular cluster system
We present a Bayesian inference approach to estimating the cumulative mass profile and mean squared velocity profile of a globular cluster given the spatial and kinematic information of its stars. Mock globular clusters with a range of…
The dynamical friction timescale of massive globular clusters (GCs) in the inner regions of cuspy dark haloes in dwarf spheroidal (dSph) galaxies can be much shorter than the Hubble time. This implies that a small fraction of the GCs is…
Observations reveal that mature spiral galaxies consist of stars, gases and plasma approximately distributed in a thin disk of circular shape, usually with a central bulge. The rotation velocities quickly increase from the galactic center…
A model for the mass in and around the Local Group previously used to fit redshifts of dwarf galaxies to their distances between 50 kpc and 2.6 Mpc under the condition of small and growing primeval departures from homogeneity is shown to…
We study the dynamical evolution of disk and halo globular clusters in the Milky Way using a series of Fokker-Planck calculations combined with parametric statistical models. Our sample of 113 clusters with velocity data is predicted to…
We review the implications of the Gaia Data Release 2 catalogue for studying the dynamics of Milky Way globular clusters, focusing on two separate topics. The first one is the analysis of the full 6-dimensional phase-space distribution of…
The connection between a galaxy's total globular cluster system (GCS) mass and its halo mass has been studied for decades and it has been found that galaxies at nearly all observed masses adhere to a linear scaling relation between these…
Many globular cluster systems have a distinct bimodal metallicity distribution function (MDF) which has strikingly similar features in many large galaxies of all types. By using the Milky Way cluster system as a typical example, we show…
A new class of models of stellar discs is introduced and used to build a self-consistent model of our Galaxy. The model is defined by the parameters that specify the action-based distribution functions (DFs) f(J) of four stellar discs…
Outer-halo globular clusters show large half-light radii and flat stellar mass functions, depleted in low-mass stars. Using N-body simulations of globular clusters on eccentric orbits within a Milky Way-like potential, we show how a…
The globular clusters (GC) of our Galaxy have been found to lie close to a plane in the log(R_e), log(sigma), SB_e space, on the continuation of the Fundamental Plane (FP) known to characterize the properties of early-type galaxies. We…
In numerous studies of the outer Galactic halo some evidence for accretion has been found. If the outer halo did form in part or wholly through merger events, we might expect to find coherent streams of stars and globular clusters following…
Globular clusters (GCs) are bright objects that span a wide range of galactocentric distances, and are thus probes of the structure of dark matter (DM) haloes. In this work, we explore whether the projected radial profiles of GCs can be…
We develop a method for recovering the global density distribution of the ancient Galactic stellar halo prior to disk formation, based on the present orbits of metal-poor stars observed in the solar neighborhood. The method relies on the…
We examine the dynamics of the stars and globular clusters in the nearby giant galaxy M87 and constrain the mass distribution, using all the available data over a large range of radii, including higher-order moments of the stellar…
The infall and merger scenario of massive clusters in the Milky Way's potential well, as one of the Milky Way formation mechanisms, is reexamined to understand how the stars of the merging clusters are redistributed during and after the…
Starting from an axisymmetric equilibrium distribution function (DF) in action space, representing a Milky Way thin disc stellar population, we use the linearized Boltzmann equation to explicitly compute the response to a three-dimensional…
We explore how diffuse stellar light and globular clusters (GCs) can be used to trace the matter distribution of their host halo using an observational methodology. For this, we use 117 simulated dark matter (DM) haloes from the $(34.4~\rm…
The first and second moments of stellar velocities encode important information about the formation history of the Galactic halo. However, due to the lack of tangential motion and inaccurate distances of the halo stars, the velocity moments…
The spatial distribution of compact dark matter in our Galaxy can be determined in a few years of monitoring Galactic globular clusters for microlensing. Globular clusters are the only dense fields of stars distributed throughout the…