Related papers: Demography of galactic technosignatures
In the long run, the eventual extinction of any biological population is an inevitable outcome. While extensive research has focused on the average time it takes for a population to go extinct under various circumstances, there has been…
The cornerstone mission Gaia, together with complementary surveys, will revolutionize our understanding of the formation and history of our Galaxy, providing accurate stellar masses, radii, ages, distances, as well as chemical properties…
The Kepler mission has shown that a significant fraction of all stars may have an Earth-size habitable planet. A dramatic support was the recent detection of Proxima Centauri b. Using a Drake-equation like formalism I derive an equation for…
With the start of the Gaia era, the time has come to address the major challenge of deriving the star formation history and evolution of the disk of our MilkyWay. Here we review our present knowledge of the outer regions of the Milky Way…
We discuss the evolution of oxygen, carbon and nitrogen in galaxies of different morphological type by adopting detailed chemical evolution models with different star formation histories (continuous star formation or starbursts). We start…
The advent of 8--10 meter class telescopes enables direct measurement of the chemical properties in the ionized gas of cosmologically--distant galaxies with the same nebular analysis techniques used in local H II regions. We show that…
Stellar Populations are the fossil record of Galactic evolution. Interpretation of this record in the Local Group allows one to determine reliably the dominant physics controlling the evolution of those galaxies which are typical of the…
The inner $\sim5$ kiloparsec (kpc) region of the Milky Way is complex. Unravelling the evolution of the Galaxy requires precise understanding of the formation of this region. We report a study focused on disentangling the inner Galaxy ($r <…
Chemical abundances provide important clues to the evolution of galaxies. Ionized nebulae are one of the main sources of chemical abundance measurements, especially in external galaxies. Studies of H II regions have shown that the overall…
This paper proposes a long term scheme for robotic exploration of the galaxy,and then considers the implications in terms of the `Fermi paradox' and our search for ETI. We discuss the parameter space of the `galactic ecology' of…
The distribution of stars in the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram narrates their evolutionary history and directly assesses their properties. Placing stars in this diagram however requires the knowledge of their distances and interstellar…
The trends of chemical abundances and abundance ratios observed in stars of different ages, kinematics, and metallicities bear the imprints of several physical processes that concur to shape the host galaxy properties. By inspecting these…
Compared to the well-studied infrared and radio domains, galaxy emission in the millimeter (mm) - centimeter (cm) range has been less observed. In this domain, galaxy emission consists of thermal dust, free-free and synchrotron emissions…
Using two alternative [O/H]-[Fe/H] dependences, the empirical oxygen abundance distribution (EGD) is deduced from two different samples of old objects, available in the literature. Under the assumption that each distribution (with the…
We present a probabilistic formulation of the classical problem of synthesizing spectral properties of a galaxy using a base of star clusters. The problem consists of estimating the population vector x, composed by the contributions of…
We present an isolated Milky Way-like simulation in GADGET2 N-body SPH code. The Galactic disk star formation rate (SFR) surface densities and stellar mass indicative of Solar neighbourhood are used as thresholds to model the distribution…
We present a generalization of the multiphase chemical evolution model applied to a wide set of theoretical galaxies with different masses and morphological types. This generalized set of models has been computed using the so-called…
The current explosion in detection and characterization of thousands of extrasolar planets from the Kepler mission, the Hubble Space Telescope, and large ground-based telescopes opens a new era in searches for Earth-analog exoplanets with…
Humanity has wondered whether we are alone for millennia. The discovery of life elsewhere in the Universe, particularly intelligent life, would have profound effects, comparable to those of recognizing that the Earth is not the center of…
The extragalactic gamma-ray and neutrino emission may have a contribution from dark matter (DM) annihilations. In the case of discrepancies between observations and standard predictions, one could infer the DM pair annihilation cross…