Related papers: Age Dating the Galactic Bar with the Nuclear Stell…
Aims. We aim to characterize the properties of the stellar populations in the central few hundred parsecs of nearby galactic nuclei; specifically their age, mass, and 3D geometry. Methods. We use spatially resolved spectroscopic…
Identifying the structure of our Galaxy has always been fraught with difficulties, and while modern surveys continue to make progress building a map of the Milky Way, there is still much to understand. The arm and bar features are important…
We investigate the metallicity, age, and orbital anatomy of the inner Milky Way, specifically focussing on the outer bar region. We integrated a sample of APOGEE DR16 inner Galaxy stars in a state of the art bar-bulge potential with a slow…
The nuclear disc is a dense stellar structure at the centre of the Milky Way, with a radius of $\sim$150 pc. It has been a place of intense star formation in the past several tens of millions of years but its overall formation history has…
The best way to trace back the history of star formation and mass assembly of the Milky Way disc is by combining chemical compositions, ages and phase-space information for a large number of disc stars. With the advent of large surveys of…
The Milky Way's nuclear star cluster (NSC) is a unique laboratory to study the formation and evolution of dense stellar systems around a supermassive black hole. Previous work suggests that most stars in the NSC are old; however, the…
The inner ~200 pc region of the Milky Way contains a nuclear stellar disc and a nuclear star cluster that are embedded in the larger Galactic bar. These stellar systems overlap spatially, which makes it challenging to separate stars that…
Vertically extended, high velocity dispersion stellar distributions appear to be a ubiquitous feature of disc galaxies, and both internal and external mechanisms have been proposed to be the major driver of their formation. However, it is…
The Apache Point Observatory Galactic Evolution Experiment has measured the stellar velocities of red giant stars in the inner Milky Way. We confirm that the line of sight velocity distributions (LOSVDs) in the mid-plane exhibit a second…
A multi-faceted approach is described to constrain the importance of bar-driven evolution in disk galaxies, particularly bulge formation. N-body simulations are used to construct stellar kinematic bar diagnostics for edge-on systems and to…
Stellar ages are key for determining the formation history of the Milky Way, but are difficult to measure precisely. Furthermore, methods that use chemical abundances to infer ages may entangle the intrinsic evolution of stars with the…
Stellar bars are common morphological structures in the local Universe; according to optical and NIR surveys, they are present in about two-thirds of disc galaxies. These elongated structures are also believed to play a crucial role in…
Some barred galaxies, including the Milky Way, host a boxy/peanut/X-shaped bulge (BPX-shaped bulge). Previous studies suggested that the BPX-shaped bulge can either be developed by bar buckling or by vertical inner Lindblad resonance (vILR)…
Classical Cepheids are useful tracers of the Galactic young stellar population because their distances and ages can be determined from their period-luminosity and period-age relations. In addition, the radial velocities and chemical…
In the absence of an interaction, central bars might be the most effective mechanism for radial motions of gas in barred spiral galaxies, which represent two-thirds of disc galaxies. The dynamical effects induced by bars in the first few…
We use an $N$-body+smoothed particle hydrodynamics simulation of an isolated barred galaxy to study the age dependence of bulge longitudinal proper motion ($\mu_l$) rotation curves. We show that close to the minor axis ($|l| \sim 0^\circ$)…
Bars play an integral role in regulating star formation (SF) in spiral galaxies, from triggering central starbursts to driving quenching. The diverse SF morphologies observed in local barred galaxies reflect different evolutionary stages of…
We present a study of the stellar populations within the central regions of four nearby barred galaxies, and use a novel technique to constrain the duration of bar activity. We focus on the star formation 'desert', a region within each of…
The last few years witnessed a change of perspective in the context of galaxy formation and evolution. The major role played by bars in the history of these fundamental building blocks of our universe was finally realized. However, and…
The orbit distribution of young stars in the Galactic disk is highly structured, from well-defined clusters to streams of stars that may be widely dispersed across the sky, but are compact in orbital action-angle space. The age distribution…