Related papers: Galactic Panspermia
Observations of circumstellar disks around stars as a function of stellar properties such as mass, metallicity, multiplicity, and age, provide constraints on theories concerning the formation and evolution of planetary systems. Utilizing…
Typical stars in the Milky Way galaxy have velocities of hundreds of kilometres per second and experience gravitational accelerations of $\sim 10^{-10}$ m s$^{-2}$, resulting in velocity changes of a few centimetres per second over a…
We present a spectroscopic sample of 910 distant halo stars from the Hypervelocity Star survey from which we derive the velocity dispersion profile of the Milky Way halo. The sample is a mix of 74% evolved horizontal branch stars and 26%…
Previous analyses of large databases of Milky Way stars have revealed the stellar disk of our Galaxy to be warped and that this imparts a strong signature on the kinematics of stars beyond the solar neighborhood. However, due to the…
Stars are fossils that retain the history of their host galaxies. Carbon and heavier elements are created inside stars and are ejected when they die. From the spatial distribution of elements in galaxies, it is therefore possible to…
With the recent discovery of transiting planetary material around WD 1145+017, a critical target has been identified that links the evolution of planetary systems with debris disks and their accretion onto the star. We present a series of…
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…
Both the three-dimensional density of red clump giants and the gas kinematics in the inner Galaxy indicate that the pattern speed of the Galactic bar could be much lower than previously estimated. Here, we show that such slow bar models are…
Masers found in massive star-forming regions can be located precisely in six-dimensional phase space and therefore serve as a tool for studying Milky Way dynamics. The non-random orbital phases at which the masers are found and the…
Cosmic rays up to at least PeV energies are usually described in the framework of an elementary scenario that involves acceleration by objects that are located in the disk of the Milky Way, such as supernova remnants or massive star-forming…
Three methods for computing the total star formation rate of the Milky Way agree well with a reference value of $1.65\pm0.19$ M$_\odot$ yr$^{-1}$. They are then used to determine the radial dependence of the star formation rate and face-on…
The oldest stars in the Milky Way (born in the first few billion years) are expected to have a high density in the inner few kpc, spatially overlapping with the Galactic bulge. We use spectroscopic data from the Pristine Inner Galaxy Survey…
We have used GALEX and SDSS observations to extract 7 band photometric magnitudes for over 80,000 objects in the vicinity of the North Galactic Pole. Although these had been identified as stars by the SDSS pipeline, we found through fitting…
When gas giant protoplanets grow sufficiently massive, circumplanetary disks would form. While solid bodies captured by the circumplanetary disks likely contribute to the growth of the planets and regular satellites around them, some of…
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…
Our Milky Way Galaxy is a typical large spiral galaxy, representative of the most common morphological type in the local Universe. We can determine the properties of individual stars in unusual detail, and use the characteristics of the…
We estimate the distribution of ejection velocities for the known population of high galactic latitude runaway stars. The initial sample is a collection of 174 early-type stars selected from the literature. The stars are first classified…
A significant fraction of the stellar population in the cusp around central black holes of galaxies consists of compact remnants of evolved stars, such as white dwarfs, neutron stars and stellar mass black holes. We estimate the rate of…
About 3,500 planetary nebulae (PNe) are currently known in the Milky Way, which shows a great discrepancy with the expected number for these objects, regardless of the reference used, $33-59 \times 10^{3}$. The same holds for symbiotic…
We provide a method for estimating the projected density distribution $\bar{n}_2w_p(r_p)$ of photometric objects around spectroscopic objects in a redshift survey. This quantity describes the distribution of Photometric sources with certain…