Related papers: The Multidimensional Milky Way
Galaxy masses play a fundamental role in our understanding of structure formation models. This review addresses the variety and reliability of mass estimators that pertain to stars, gas, and dark matter. The different sections on masses…
Galactic interstellar dust has a profound impact not only on our observations of objects throughout the Universe, but also on the morphology, star formation, and chemical evolution of the Galaxy. The advent of massive imaging and…
We summarize evidence that the halo of the Milky Way comprises two different, and broadly overlapping, stellar components. The two structures exhibit different chemical compositions, spatial distributions, and kinematics. These results were…
I discuss three different topics concerning the chemical evolution of the Milky Way (MW). 1) The metallicity distribution of the MW halo; it is shown that this distribution can be analytically derived in the framework of the hierarchical…
The Milky Way bulge offers a unique opportunity to investigate in detail the role that different processes such as dynamical instabilities, hierarchical merging, and dissipational collapse may have played in the history of the Galaxy…
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,…
I present an overview of the science goals and achievements of ongoing spectroscopic surveys of individual stars in the nearby Universe. I include a brief discussion of the development of the field of Galactic Archaeology - using the fossil…
We discuss the opportunities for astronomical discovery via ground-based astrometry carried out in the United States during the 2010-2020 decade. We describe imminent scientific breakthroughs that can be achieved at both classic astrometric…
The Milky Way is a barred galaxy whose central bulge has a box/peanut shape and consists of multiple stellar populations with different orbit distributions. This review describes dynamical and chemo-dynamical equilibrium models for the…
Achieving a precise understanding of galaxy formation in a cosmological context is one of the great challenges in theoretical astrophysics, due to the vast range of spatial scales involved in the relevant physical processes. Observations in…
We study the formation of chemical sequences in the stellar disc of Milky Way (MW)-mass galaxies in a full cosmological context with the auriga simulations. We focus on the conditions giving rise to bi-modal $\alpha$-chemistry in the MW…
Deep photometric surveys of the Milky Way have revealed diffuse structures encircling our Galaxy far beyond the "classical" limits of the stellar disk. This paper reviews results from our own and other observational programs, which together…
In spite of much work, the overall spiral structure morphology of the Milky Way remains somewhat uncertain. In the last two decades, accurate distance measurements have provided us with an opportunity to solve this issue. Using the precise…
The aim of Galactic Archaeology is to recover the evolutionary history of the Milky Way from its present day kinematical and chemical state. Because stars move away from their birth sites, the current dynamical information alone is not…
The last 20 years have seen an explosion in our understanding of the large-scale distribution and motions of galaxies in the nearby universe. The field has moved from a largely qualitative, morphological description of the structures seen…
Our Galaxy blocks a significant portion of the extragalactic sky from view, hampering studies of large-scale structure. This produces an incomplete knowledge of the distribution of galaxies, and, assuming galaxies trace mass, of the gravity…
Galaxies with Milky Way-like stellar masses have a wide range of bulge and black hole masses; in turn, these correlate with other properties such as star formation history. While many processes may drive bulge formation, major and minor…
Because of its nearness to Earth, the centre of the Milky Way is the only galaxy nucleus in which we can study the characteristics, distribution, kinematics, and dynamics of the stars on milli-parsec scales. We have accurate and precise…
We present a phenomenological approach to the study of disk galaxy evolution, based on i) a detailed modelling of the Milky Way (used as a prototype disk galaxy) and ii) an extension of the model to other disks through some simple scaling…
We review recent research on the Milky Way galaxy and try to investigate whether its shape is similar to other barred galaxies. The emphasis is given on microlensing research because this method can be useful in determining the shape of the…