Related papers: A new moving group in the Local Arm
The Milky Way is a unique laboratory, where stellar properties can be measured and analyzed in detail. In particular, stars in the older populations encode information on the mechanisms that led to the formation of our Galaxy. In this…
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 center of our disk galaxy, the Milky Way, is dominated by a boxy/peanut-shaped bulge. Numerous studies of the bulge based on stellar photometry have concluded that the bulge stars are exclusively old. The perceived lack of young stars…
Context. The origin and nature of spiral arms remain unclear. Star forming regions and young stars are generally strongly associated to the spiral structure, but there are few quantitative predictions from simulations about the involvement…
We present new proper motions from the 10 m Keck telescopes for a puzzling population of massive, young stars located within 3.5" (0.14 pc) of the supermassive black hole at the Galactic Center. Our proper motion measurements have…
In the course of a search for common proper motion binaries, in the Jones & Walker (JW) catalogue of proper motions in the Orion Nebula Cluster, we came across several faint stars with proper motions larger than one arcsecond per century…
Nuclear Star Clusters are observed at the center of many galaxies. In particular in the center of the Milky Way the Nuclear Star Cluster coexists with a cen- tral supermassive black hole. The origin of these clusters is still unknown; a…
Scorpius-Centaurus is the nearest OB association and its hundreds of members were divided into sub-groups, including Lower Centaurus Crux. Here we study the dynamics of the Lower Centaurus Crux area stellar content. We report the revelation…
Star formation is enhanced in spiral arms because of a combination of orbit crowding, cloud collisions, and gravitational instabilities. The characteristic mass for the instability is 10^7 Msun in gas and 10^5 Msun in stars, and the…
This paper is part of a project to search the inner Milky Way for hidden massive clusters and to address the question of whether our Galaxy still forms clusters similar to the progenitors of the present-day globular clusters. We report high…
We estimated the angular momentum, $J$, of $720$ galaxies in the Local Volume with distances $r < 12$ Mpc. The distribution of the average angular momentum along the Hubble sequence has a maximum at the morphological type $T= 4$ (Sbc),…
The sample of known star clusters, the fundamental building blocks of galaxies, in the Milky Way is still extremely incomplete for objects beyond a distance of 1-2kpc. Many of the more distant and young clusters are compact and hidden…
We have used precise radial velocity measurements for a large number of candidate low-mass stars and brown dwarfs, to show that the young Sigma Ori ``cluster'' consists of two spatially superimposed components which are kinematically…
Young, low-mass stars in the solar neighborhood are vital for completing the mass function for nearby, young coeval groups, establishing a more complete census for evolutionary studies, and providing targets for direct-imaging exoplanet…
We present a new procedure for the identification of moving groups. It is a combination of two independent member selection methods. One is a modern implementation of a classical convergent point method for proper motion data. The other…
Spiral density wave theory attempts to describe the spiral pattern in spiral galaxies in terms of a long-lived wave structure with a constant pattern speed in order to avoid the winding dilemma. The pattern is consequently a rigidly…
The centre of the Milky Way is occupied by a nuclear star cluster, which contains the supermassive black hole Sgr A*. The cluster is embedded in the larger surrounding nuclear stellar disc. These three components dominate the mass budget of…
New observations from the Gaia spacecraft have traced an emerging demographic of low-mass associations disconnected from larger associations or GMCs. The first of these associations were recently characterized, but the star-forming…
We revisit the Great Attractor using the Manticore-Local suite of digital twins of the nearby Universe. The Great Attractor concept has been proposed as an answer to three distinct questions: what sources the Local Group velocity in the…
The observed gas dynamics in the Milky Way can only be explained by a bar in the galactic center. Such a bar is directly visible in the near-IR maps of the bulge, where it causes a distinctive asymmetric light distribution pattern. Another…