Related papers: Pannekoek's Galaxy
Anton Pannekoek (1873-1960) was both an influential Marxist and an innovative astronomer. This paper will analyse the various innovative methods that he developed to represent the visual aspect of the Milky Way and the statistical…
Jacobus Cornelius Kapteyn (1851-1922) presented a model for the distribution of stars in space together with a dynamical interpretation in terms of an equilibrium between the gravitational field of the stars and their random motion and…
We present the results of a wide-field camera survey of the stars in the Monoceros Ring, thought to be an additional structure in the Milky Way of unknown origin. Lying roughly in the plane of the Milky Way, this may represent a unique…
We present a new satellite in the outer halo of the Galaxy, the first Milky Way satellite found in the stacked photometric catalog of the Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System 1 (Pan-STARRS1) Survey. From follow-up photometry…
Distance measurements to molecular clouds are important, but are often made separately for each cloud of interest, employing very different different data and techniques. We present a large, homogeneous catalog of distances to molecular…
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…
Our Galaxy blocks a significant portion of the extragalactic sky from view, hampering studies of large-scale structure. This produces an incomplete knowledge of the distribution of galaxies, and, assuming galaxies trace mass, of the gravity…
Dust and stars in the plane of the Milky Way create a "Zone of Avoidance" in the extragalactic sky. Galaxies are distributed in gigantic labyrinth formations, filaments and great walls with occasional dense clusters. They can be traced all…
Context: Infrared dark clouds are the coldest and densest portions of giant molecular clouds. The most massive ones represent some of the most likely birthplaces for the next generation of massive stars in the Milky Way. Because a strong…
Cornelis Easton (1864-1929) became a journalist and newspaper editor. During most of his career he was active as an amateur astronomer and contributed important papers in international astronomical journals This concerned three areas. The…
The Sun is located close to the Galactic mid-plane, meaning that we observe the Galaxy through significant quantities of dust. Moreover, the vast majority of the Galaxy's stars also lie in the disc, meaning that dust has an enormous impact…
The infall of the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) into the Milky Way's halo impacts the distribution of stars and dark matter in our Galaxy. Mapping the observational consequences of this encounter can inform us about the properties of both…
Our Galaxy, the Milky Way, is a benchmark for understanding disk galaxies. It is the only galaxy whose formation history can be studied using the full distribution of stars from white dwarfs to supergiants. The oldest components provide us…
We propose a new method for measuring the spatial density distribution of the stellar halo of the Milky Way. Our method is based on a pairwise statistic of the distribution of stars on the sky, the angular two-point correlation function…
An all-sky cloud monitoring system that generates relative opacity maps over many of the world's premier astronomical observatories is described. Photometric measurements of numerous background stars are combined with simultaneous sky…
The Milky Way is a barred spiral galaxy, with physical properties inferred from various tracers informed by the extrapolation of structures seen in other galaxies. However, the distances of these tracers are measured indirectly and are…
In 1785 astronomer William Herschel mapped out the shape of the Milky Way star system using measurements he called "star-gages." Herschel's star-gage method is described in detail, with particular attention given to the assumptions on which…
Almost 80 years have passed since Trumpler's analysis of the Galactic open cluster system laid one of the main foundations for understanding the nature and structure of the Milky Way. Since then, the open cluster system has been recognised…
Allan Sandage was an observational astronomer who was happiest at a telescope. On Hubble's sudden death Allan Sandage inherited the programmes using the world's largest optical telescope at Palomar to determine the distances and number…
A general overview of the understanding of our Galaxy is presented following the lines of its main structures: halo, disc, bulge/bar. This review is emphasising some "Time Domain Astronomy" contributions. On the one hand the distance and…