Related papers: Dynamical mass distribution and velocity structure…
We present a study of the chemical abundances of Solar neighbourhood stars associated to dynamical structures in the Milky Way's (thick) disk. These stars were identified as overdensity in the eccentricity range 0.3< ecc < 0.5 in the…
Despite their relatively high intrinsic brightness and the fact that they are more numerous than younger OB stars and kinematically colder than older red giants, A-type stars have rarely been used as Galactic tracers. They may, in fact, be…
Stellar mass is the most fundamental property of a galaxy. While it has been robustly measured for millions of external galaxies, it remains poorly constrained for the Milky Way because of the strong selection effect from our inside…
The evolution history of the Milky Way disk is imprinted in the ages, positions, and chemical compositions of individual stars. In this study, we derive the intrinsic density distribution of different stellar populations using the final…
The center of our galaxy is home to a massive black hole, SgrA*, and a nuclear star cluster containing stellar populations of various ages. While the late type stars may be too old to have retained memory of their initial orbital…
The Milky Way's nuclear stellar disc (NSD) and nuclear star cluster (NSC) are the main features of the Galactic centre. Nevertheless, their observation is hampered by the extreme source crowding and high extinction. Hence, their relation…
HIRES on the Keck I telescope has been used to measure the first radial velocities for stars belonging to eleven, heavily-reddened globular clusters in the direction of the inner Galaxy. The question of kinematic substructuring among the…
The central regions of galaxies show the presence of massive black holes and/or dense stellar systems. The question about their modes of formation is still under debate. A likely explanation of the formation of the central dense stellar…
We present a new analytical solution to the steady-state distribution of stars close to a central supermassive black hole of mass $M_{\bullet}$ in the center of a galaxy. Assuming a continuous mass function of the form $dN/dm \propto…
We present a novel interpretation of the previously puzzling different behaviours of stellar populations of the Milky Way's bulge. We first show, by means of pure N-body simulations, that initially co-spatial stellar populations with…
We have compiled a sample of 699 stars from the recent literature with detailed chemical abundance information (spanning -4.2 < [Fe/H] < +0.3), and we compute their space velocities and Galactic orbital parameters. We identify members of…
Gaia DR2 has delivered full-sky 6-D measurements for millions of stars, and the quest to understand the dynamics of our Galaxy has entered a new phase. Our aim is to reveal and characterize the kinematic sub-structure of the different…
Nuclear star clusters (NSCs) are located at the photometric and dynamical centers of the majority of galaxies. They are among the densest star clusters in the Universe. The NSC in the Milky Way is the only object of this class that can be…
We study the vertical stellar distribution of the Milky Way thin disk in detail with particular focus on the outer disk. We treat the galactic disk as a gravitationally coupled, three-component system consisting of stars, atomic hydrogen…
We give independent proof of the deficit of stars in the in-plane central disc with respect to the predictions of a pure exponential density distribution. We use three different methods: 1) the inversion of the red clump giant distribution…
Although there have been numerous studies of chemical abundances in the Galactic bulge, the central two degrees have been relatively unexplored due to the heavy and variable interstellar extinction, extreme stellar crowding, and the…
We investigate the rotation curve of the Milky Way using a multi-component mass model including a stellar disk, a gaseous disk, a bulge/bar component, and a dark-matter halo. The stellar and gas contributions are calibrated using recent…
The Nuclear Stellar Disk has been a highly active star-forming region in the Milky Way for approximately the last 30 million years. Despite hosting prominent clusters like Arches, Quintuplet, and Nuclear Stellar, their combined mass is less…
We study the dynamics and evolution of the Milky Way nuclear star cluster performing a high resolution direct one-million-body simulation. Focusing on the interactions between such stellar system and the central supermassive black hole, we…
Numerical simulations of double-barred galaxies predict the build-up of different structural components (e.g., bulges, inner discs) in the central regions of disc galaxies. In those simulations, inner bars have a prominent role in the…