Related papers: Galaxy simulations in the Gaia era
Studying our Galaxy, the Milky Way (MW), gives us a close-up view of the interplay between cosmology, dark matter, and galaxy formation. In the next decade our understanding of the MW's dynamics, stellar populations, and structure will…
In chemodynamical evolution models it is usually assumed that the Milky Way galaxy forms from the inside-out implying that gas inflows onto the disk decrease with galactocentric distance. Similarly, to reproduce differences between chemical…
The hierarchical model of galaxy formation predicts that the Milky Way halo is populated by tidal debris of dwarf galaxies and globular clusters. Due to long dynamical times, debris from the lowest mass objects remains coherent as thin and…
Detailed models of galactic disk formation and evolution require knowledge about the initial conditions under which disk galaxies form, the boundary conditions that affect their secular evolution and the micro-physical processes that drive…
The history of the formation and evolution of the Milky Way Galaxy is found in the spatial distribution, kinematics, age and chemical abundance distributions of long-lived stars. From this fossil record one can in principle extract the star…
We study the possibility that the Milky Way's cool stellar disc includes mergers with ancient stars. Galaxies are understood to form in a hierarchical manner, where smaller (proto-)galaxies merge into larger ones. Stars in galaxies, like…
At the heart of a successful theory of galaxy formation must be a detailed physical understanding of the dissipational processes which form spiral galaxies. To what extent can we unravel the events that produced the Galaxy as we see it…
Studies of stellar populations, understood to mean collections of stars with common spatial, kinematic, chemical, and/or age distributions, have been reinvigorated during the last decade by the advent of large-area sky surveys such as SDSS,…
Galactic Archaeology, i.e. the use of chemo-dynamical information for stellar samples covering large portions of the Milky Way to infer the dominant processes involved in its formation and evolution, is now a powerful method thanks to the…
Understanding the formation and evolution of the Milky Way's thin and thick discs is crucial to galaxy formation studies. We derive age and metallicity distributions of the kinematic thick and thin discs using the CMDft.Gaia pipeline and…
We investigate thin and thick stellar disc formation in Milky-Way-mass galaxies using twelve FIRE-2 cosmological zoom-in simulations. All simulated galaxies experience an early period of bursty star formation that transitions to a late-time…
Gaia is an ambitious ESA space mission which will provide photometric and astrometric measurements with the accuracies needed to produce a kinematic census of almost one billion stars in our Galaxy. These data will revolutionize our…
For several decades now, open clusters have been used to study the structure and chemical evolution of the disk of our Galaxy. Due to the fact that their ages and metallicities can be determined with relatively good precision, and since…
The advent of Gaia's 2nd data release in combination with large spectroscopic surveys are revolutionizing our understanding of the Galaxy. Thanks to these and the knowledge accumulated thus far, a more mature picture of the evolution of the…
We illustrate the formation and evolution of the Milky Way over cosmic time, utilizing a sample of 10 million red giant stars with full chemodynamical information, including metallicities and $\alpha$-abundances from low-resolution Gaia XP…
Our understanding of how the Galaxy was formed and evolves is severely hampered by the lack of precise constraints on basic stellar properties such as distances, masses, and ages. Here, we show that solar-like pulsating red giants represent…
Estimating ages for stars is difficult at best, but Galactic problems have their own requirements that go beyond those for other areas of astrophysics. As in other areas, asteroseismology is helping, and in this review I discuss some of the…
Recent observations have shown that star-forming galaxies like our own Milky Way evolve kinematically into ordered thin disks over the last ~8 billion years since z=1.2, undergoing a process of "disk settling." For the first time, we study…
We study the long-term evolution of the Milky Way (MW) over cosmic time by modeling the star formation, cosmic rays, metallicity, stellar dynamics, outflows and inflows of the galactic system to obtain various insights into the galactic…
I review observational studies of the large-scale star formation process in nearby galaxies. A wealth of new multi-wavelength data provide an unprecedented view on the interplay of the interstellar medium and (young) stellar populations on…