Related papers: Closing remarks and Outlook
Galaxies form and evolve in the context of their local and large-scale environments. Their baryonic content that we observe with imaging and spectroscopy is intimately connected to the properties of their dark matter halos, and to their…
As galaxies form hierarchically, larger satellites may accrete alongside smaller companions in group infall events. This coordinated accretion is likely to have left signatures in the Milky Way's stellar halo at the present day. Our goal is…
The GAIA Observatory, ESA's Cornerstone 6 mission, addresses the origin and evolution of our Galaxy, and a host of other scientific challenges. GAIA will provide unprecedented positional and radial velocity measurements with the accuracies…
Near-field observations may provide tight constraints - i.e. "boundary conditions" - on any model of structure formation in the Universe. Detailed observational data have long been available for the Milky Way (e.g. Freeman $\&$…
The early chemical evolution of the Galaxy and the Universe is vital to our understanding of a host of astrophysical phenomena. Since the most metal-poor Galactic stars (with metallicities down to [Fe/H]\sim-5.5) are relics from the…
This paper presents theoretical star formation and chemical enrichment histories for the stellar halo of the Milky Way based on new chemodynamical modeling. The goal of this study is to assess the extent to which metal-poor stars in the…
I present written notes from three 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". I…
We present the results of a systematic Milky Way satellite search performed across an array of publicly available wide-area photometric surveys. Our aim is to complement previous searches by widening the parameter space covered.…
This paper reports a Galactic kinematical and dynamical analysis of 1003 main-sequence carbon stars. The sample is drawn from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, and cross-matched with Gaia DR3 to obtain 6-dimensional positions and velocities…
In the past decades, different approaches have been developed in order to link the physical properties of galaxies to the dark matter haloes in which they reside. In this review, I give a brief overview of methods, aims, and limits of these…
The standard cosmological model ($\Lambda$-CDM) predicts that galaxies are built through hierarchical assembly on cosmological timescales$^{1,2}$. The Milky Way, like other disc galaxies, underwent violent mergers and accretion of small…
The next generation of multi-object spectrographs (MOS) will deliver comprehensive surveys of the Galaxy, Magellanic Clouds and nearby dwarfs. These will provide us with the vast samples, spanning the full extent of the Hertzsprung-Russell…
Context. Galaxy clusters assemble over gigayears in a very anisotropic environment, which causes a remarkable diversity in their mass assembly histories (MAH). Aims. In this work, we have aimed to understand how the present-day properties…
Studies of nearby galaxies including the Milky Way have provided fundamental information on the evolution of structure in the Universe, the existence and nature of dark matter, the origin and evolution of galaxies, and the global features…
Wide or fragile pairs are sensitive probes of the galactic potential, and they have been used to provide information about the galactic tidal field, the density of GMC and the masses of dark matter perturbers present in both the disk and…
This symposium has revealed considerable new progress on nuclei of galaxies over the last three years. In this talk, I will try to point out the advances since the last meeting on exactly the same subject held three years ago at Ringberg…
Compact object binaries (a black hole or a neutron star orbiting a non-degenerate stellar companion) are key to our understanding of late massive star evolution, in addition to being some of the best probes of extreme gravity and accretion…
Over the last decade Galactic planetary nebula discoveries have entered a golden age due to the emergence of high sensitivity, high resolution narrow-band surveys of the Galactic plane. These have been coupled with access to complimentary,…
Dense stellar systems in general and star clusters in particular have recently regained the interest of the extragalactic and even cosmology communities, due to the role they could play as actors and probes of re-ionization, galactic…
This is a brief introduction to the closing discussion of the IAU Symposium 295, "The Intriguing Life of Massive Galaxies", that was held in Beijing from August 27 through 31, 2012. The discussion was focused on only four hot items, namely…