Related papers: Closing remarks and Outlook
Stellar halos around galaxies retain fundamental evidence of the processes which lead to their build up. Sophisticated models of galaxy formation in a cosmological context yield quantitative predictions about various observable…
We investigate what the proposed ESA astrometric satellite GAIA will reveal by observing the halo of the Milky Way. Specifically, we look for halo streams which are the signatures left by the merging/accretion events experienced by a…
At the turn of the decade we arguably move from the era of precision cosmology to the era of galaxy formation. One approach to this problem will be via the construction of comprehensive galaxy samples. In this review I take the opportunity…
Surveys of the local and distant Universe are the means to test and improve our models of galaxy formation. Substantial successes in the models are evident, while there is also considerable recent progress in identifying what remains to be…
Recent studies suggest that chemical abundances hold the key to disentangling halo substructure, providing a more reliable tracer than dynamics alone. We aim to probe the Milky Way stellar halo using high-dimensional chemical abundances…
The next decade affords tremendous opportunity to achieve the goals of Galactic archaeology. That is, to reconstruct the evolutionary narrative of the Milky Way, based on the empirical data that describes its current morphological,…
Metal-poor stars play an import role in the understanding of Galaxy formation and evolution. Evidence of the early mergers that built up the Galaxy might remain in the distributions of abundances, kinematics, and orbital parameters of the…
The GAIA satellite will observe the Galaxy and its closest satellites in great detail. This should allow (i) dating past events of dwarf galaxies merging or interacting with the Galaxy, and much improved orbital parameters of the nine dwarf…
These notes present material from lectures given at the 54th Saas-Fee Advanced Course of the Swiss Society of Astrophysics and Astronomy in January 2025, entitled "Galaxies and Black Holes in the First Billion Years as seen by the JWST",…
Large-scale surveys of the Perseus molecular cloud have provided many clues as to the processes occurring during star formation. Here, analysis of both column density maps and kinematic data (maps and pointed data) are discussed and…
We are learning much about how structure forms, in particular how clusters as nodes in the cosmic web evolve and accrete matter, and about the physical processes within these objects. In the next decade, the study of clusters will enable us…
Recently the search for the oldest stars have started to focus on the Bulge region. The Galactic bulge hosts extremely old stars, with ages compatible with the ages of the oldest halo stars. The data coming from these recent observations…
Despite the Milky Way's proximity to us, our knowledge of its dark matter halo is fairly limited, and there is still considerable uncertainty in its halo mass. Many past techniques have been limited by assumptions such as the Galaxy being…
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 IAU Symposium 230, Populations of High Energy Sources in Galaxies, has been a wide-spectrum affair, with talks discussing results from the soft X-ray to the Gamma-ray range on virtually the entire universe, from our Galaxy to the high…
We live in a universe filled with galaxies with an amazing variety of sizes and shapes. One of the biggest challenges for astronomers working in this field is to understand how all these types relate to each other in the background of an…
The body of photometric and astrometric data on stars in the Galaxy has been growing very fast in recent years (Hipparcos/Tycho, OGLE-3, 2-Mass, DENIS, UCAC2, SDSS, RAVE, Pan Starrs, Hermes, ...) and in two years ESA will launch the Gaia…
We present a Field of Streams visualizing stellar structures in the Milky Way halo as viewed by the Dark Energy Camera (DECam). We use $g$- and $r$-band imaging from the Dark Energy Survey and the DECam Legacy Survey, covering $18{,}700…
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 halo assembly bias, a phenomenon referring to dependencies of the large-scale bias of a dark matter halo other than its mass, is a fundamental property of the standard cosmological model. First discovered in 2005 from the Millennium Run…