Related papers: Reverse engineering the Milky Way
We use the age-metallicity distribution of 96 Galactic globular clusters (GCs) to infer the formation and assembly history of the Milky Way (MW), culminating in the reconstruction of its merger tree. Based on a quantitative comparison of…
The formation of our Milky Way can be parsed qualitatively into different phases that resulted in its structurally different stellar populations: the halo and the disk components. Revealing a quantitative overall picture of the Galactic…
Here we examine the Milky Way's GC system to estimate the fraction of accreted versus in situ formed GCs. We first assemble a high quality database of ages and metallicities for 93 Milky Way GCs from literature deep colour-magnitude data.…
Globular clusters (GCs) provide statistically significant coeval populations of stars spanning various evolutionary stages, allowing robust constraints on stellar evolution model parameters and ages. We analyze eight old Milky Way GCs with…
We use Gaia DR2 astrometric and photometric data, published radial velocities and MESA models to infer distances, orbits, surface gravities, and effective temperatures for all ultra metal-poor stars ($\FeH<-4.0$ dex) available in the…
Galactic halos are known to grow hierarchically, inside out. This implies a correlation between the infall lookback time of satellites and their binding energy. Cosmological simulations predict a linear relation between the infall lookback…
If the favored hierarchical cosmological model is correct, then the Milky Way system should have accreted ~100-200 luminous satellite galaxies in the past \~12 Gyr. We model this process using a hybrid semi-analytic plus N-body approach…
We combine the six high-resolution Aquarius dark matter simulations with a semi-analytic galaxy formation model to investigate the properties of the satellites of Milky Way-like galaxies. We find good correspondence with the observed…
There is ample evidence in the Milky Way for globular cluster (GC) disruption. Hence one may expect that also part of the Galactic halo field stars may once have formed in GCs. We quantify the fraction of halo stars donated by GCs by…
In order to find the possible progenitors of Milky Way globular clusters, we perform orbit integrations to track the orbits of 170 Galactic globular clusters and the eleven classical Milky Way satellite galaxies backwards in time for 11 Gyr…
The analysis of the orbits of 47 dwarf satellite galaxies of the Milky Way, built using three models of the Galactic gravitational potential with different masses, is presented. The models of the Galactic potential were chosen based on the…
Globular clusters are unique tracers of ancient star formation. We determine the formation efficiencies of globular clusters across cosmic time by modeling the formation and dynamical evolution of the globular cluster population of a Milky…
Globular clusters (GCs) formed when the Milky Way experienced a phase of rapid assembly. We use the wealth of information contained in the Galactic GC population to quantify the properties of the satellite galaxies from which the Milky Way…
The Milky Way galaxy is observed to have multiple components with distinct properties, such as the bulge, disk, and halo. Unraveling the assembly history of these populations provides a powerful test to the theory of galaxy formation and…
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…
We calculate orbits for the Milky Way dwarf galaxies with proper motions, and compare these to subhalo orbits in a high resolution cosmological simulation. We use this same simulation to assess how well are able to recover orbits in the…
The 11 known satellite galaxies within 250 kpc of the Milky Way lie close to a great circle on the sky. We use high resolution N-body simulations of galactic dark matter halos to test if this remarkable property can be understood within the…
We combine the kinematics of 159 globular clusters (GCs) provided by the Gaia Early Data Release 3 (EDR3) with other observational data to classify the GCs, and to estimate the mass of the Milky Way (MW). We use the age-metallicity…
We calculate orbits for the Milky Way dwarf galaxies with proper motions, and compare these to subhalo orbits in a high resolution cosmological simulation. We use the simulation data to assess how well orbits may be recovered in the face of…
We study the formation histories and present-day structure of satellite galaxies formed in a high resolution hydrodynamic simulation of a Milky Way-like galaxy. The simulated satellites span nearly 4 orders of magnitude in luminosity but…