Related papers: The heavy-elements heritage of the falling sky
Stellar abundances and ages afford the means to link chemical enrichment to galactic formation. In the Milky Way, individual element abundances show tight correlations with age, which vary in slope across ([Fe/H]-[$\alpha$/Fe]). Here, we…
Ancient, long-lived stars remain present in all components of our home galaxy, the Milky Way. Born a few hundred million after the Big Bang and during a time that marked the very beginning of the chemical evolution, these stars display very…
We employ the first two years of data from the near-infrared, high-resolution SDSS-III/APOGEE spectroscopic survey to investigate the distribution of metallicity and alpha-element abundances of stars over a large part of the Milky Way disk.…
According to the current cosmological cold dark matter paradigm, the Galactic halo could have been the result of the assemblage of smaller structures. Here we explore the hypothesis that the classical and ultra-faint dwarf spheroidal…
I discuss various proposed formation scenarios for the metal-poor components of the Milky Way Galaxy, emphasising the stellar halo and the thick disk. Interactions and accretion played a significant role in Galactic evolution, in particular…
We use a series of high-resolution simulations of a `Milky-Way' halo coupled to semi-analytic methods to study the formation of our own Galaxy and of its stellar halo. The physical properties of our model Milky Way, as well as the age and…
The variation of metal production over time and its dilution in the interstellar medium depend on the star formation and gas accretion rates. Measuring age-chemistry relations across the Milky Way disk provides key constraints on the gas…
We extend our model of chemical evolution that successfully account for the main observables in the solar neighborhood (Alibes, Labay & Canal 2001) to the whole Milky Way halo and disk. We assume an inside-out scenario for the assembling of…
We test the hypothesis that the classical and ultra-faint dwarf spheroidal satellites of the our Galaxy have been the building blocks of the Galactic halo by comparing their [O/Fe] and [Ba/Fe] vs. [Fe/H] patterns with the ones observed in…
We take advantage of the Gaia-ESO Survey iDR4 bulge data to search for abundance anomalies that could shed light on the composite nature of the Milky Way bulge. The alpha-elements (Mg, Si, and whenever available, Ca) abundances, and their…
We derive the star formation histories of eight dwarf spheroidal (dSph) Milky Way satellite galaxies from their alpha element abundance patterns. Nearly 3000 stars from our previously published catalog (Paper II) comprise our data set. The…
We investigate the chemical enrichment of r-process elements in the early evolutionary stages of the Milky Way halo within the framework of hierarchical galaxy formation using a semi-analytic merger tree. In this paper, we focus on heavy…
(ABRIDGED) Globular clusters trace the formation and evolution of the Milky Way and surrounding galaxies, and outline their chemical enrichment history. To accomplish these tasks it is important to have large samples of clusters with…
The elemental abundance distribution of stars encodes the history of the gas-phase abundance in the Milky Way. Without a large, unbiased sample of highly precise stellar ages, the exact timing and nature of this history must be inferred…
The Milky Way (MW) stellar halo, containing debris from past accretion events, serves as a fossil record of hierarchical mass assembly. Due to their distinct properties, RR Lyrae stars (RRLs) serve as excellent tracers for identifying and…
Metal-poor stars in the Milky Way are local relics of the epoch of the first stars and the first galaxies. However, a low metallicity does not prove that a star formed in this ancient era, as metal-poor stars form over a range of redshift…
The latest edition of the APOGEE-2/DR14 survey catalogue and the first \texttt{Payne} data release of APOGEE abundance determinations by Ting et al. are examined. We identify 31 previously unremarked metal-poor giant stars with anomalously…
The chemical evolution of neutron capture elements in the Milky Way disc is still a matter of debate. We aim to understand the chemical evolution of r-process elements in Milky Way disc. We focus on three pure r-process elements Eu, Gd, and…
Knowledge of ages for stars formed over a galaxy's lifetime is fundamental to understand its formation and evolution. However, stellar ages are difficult to obtain since they cannot be measured from observations, being comparison with…
The chemical abundances of metal-poor stars provide a great deal of information regarding the individual nucleosynthetic processes that created the observed elements and the overall process of chemical enrichment of the galaxy since the…