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Terzan 5 is a stellar system located in the inner Bulge of the Galaxy and has been historically catalogued as a globular cluster. However, recent photometric (Ferraro et al. 2009) and spectroscopic (Origlia et al. 2011; Origlia et al. 2013)…
Terzan 5 is a stellar system located in the Galactic Bulge, at a distance of 5.9 kpc. Recent discoveries show that it hosts two stellar populations with different iron abundance ({\Delta}[Fe/H]=0.5). Such a large difference has been…
ABRIDGED) We revise the formation of Galactic GCs by adding the detailed chemical composition of their different stellar generations (from 1200 giants in 19 GCs) to their global parameters. We propose to identify as GCs those showing the…
The origin of S0 galaxies is discussed in the framework of early mergers in a Cold Dark Matter cosmology, and in a scenario where S0s are assumed to be former spirals stripped of gas. From an analysis of 127 early-type disk galaxies…
The Milky Way's center is the closest galaxy nucleus and the most extreme environment of the Galaxy. Although its volume is less than 1% of that of the Galactic disk, up to 10% of all new-born stars in the Galaxy in the past 100 Myr formed…
The Milky Way's inner region is dominated by a stellar bar and a boxy-peanut shaped bulge. However, which stellar populations inhabit the inner Galaxy or how star formation proceeded there is still unknown. The difficulty in studying these…
Recent observational studies have demonstrated that the complex stellar system Terzan 5 (Ter 5) harbours multiple populations of stars. Several models have attempted to interpret the large age difference of several Gyrs between the dominant…
The chemical abundances measured in stars of the Galactic bulge offer an unique opportunity to test galaxy formation models as well as impose strong constraints on the history of star formation and stellar nucleosynthesis. The aims of this…
Observations of the stellar content of the Milky Way's bulge helps to understand the stellar content and evolution of distant galaxies. In this brief overview I will first highlight some recent work directed towards measuring the history of…
Here we review the efforts of a number of recent results that use old tracers to understand the build up of the Galaxy. Details that lead directly to using these old tracers to measure distances are discussed. We concentrate on the…
By exploiting two sets of high-resolution images obtained with HST ACS/WFC over a baseline of ~10 years we have measured relative proper motions of ~70,000 stars in the stellar system Terzan 5. The results confirm the membership of the…
The Galactic Anticenter Stellar Structure (GASS) has been identified with excess surface densities of field stars in several large area sky surveys, and with an unusual, string-like grouping of five globular clusters. At least two of these…
The dominant stellar population of the central bulge of the Milky Way is old, with roughly solar metallicity. The age is very similar to that of the old metal rich bulge globular clusters and to 47 Tucanae, which has an age of 13 Gyr.…
The bulge is the oldest component of the Milky Way. Since numerous simulations of Milky Way formation have predicted that the oldest stars at a given metallicity are found on tightly bound orbits, the Galaxy's oldest stars are likely…
We present results for the chemical evolution of the Galactic bulge in the context of an inside-out formation model of the Galaxy. A supernova-driven wind was also included in analogy with elliptical galaxies. New observations of chemical…
As sites of some of the most efficient star formation in the Universe, globular clusters (GCs) have long been hypothesized to be the building blocks of young galaxies. Within the Milky Way, our best tracers of the contribution of GCs to the…
A map of the projected density of the old stellar population of the Galactic Bulge region is reconstructed using 2MASS data. By making a combination of the H and K photometric bands, it is possible to overcome the effect of reddening, and…
The discovery of the complex stellar populations hosted in two massive stellar systems in the Galactic bulge, namely Terzan5 and Liller 1, posed intriguing questions about their origin. Despite their globular cluster appearance, they host…
Recent studies have revealed that bars can form as early as a few billion years after the Big Bang, already displaying similar characteristics of evolved bars in the Local Universe. Bars redistribute angular momentum across the galaxy,…
Globular clusters (GCs) are amongst the oldest objects in the Galaxy and play a pivotal role in deciphering its early history. We present the first spectroscopic study of the GC ESO452-SC11 using the AAOmega spectrograph at medium…