Related papers: From metallicity distributions to mutual informati…
The standard cosmological scenario predicts a hierarchical formation for galaxies. Many substructures were found in the Galactic halo, identified as clumps in kinematic spaces, like the energy-angular momentum one (E-Lz), under the…
The Galactic stellar halo is predicted to have formed at least partially from the tidal disruption of accreted dwarf galaxies. This assembly history should be detectable in the orbital and chemical properties of stars. The H3 Survey is…
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…
We present a novel method to retrieve the chemical structure of galaxies using integral field spectroscopy data through the stellar Metallicity Distribution Function (MDF). This is the probability distribution of observing stellar…
There is increasing observational and theoretical evidence for a correlation between the metallicity and the mass of the stellar halo for galaxies with Milky Way-like stellar masses. Using the Illustris cosmological hydrodynamical…
We present unified chemical and spectrophotometric evolutionary synthesis models that allow to describe composite stellar populations in a chemically consistent way. Keeping track of the ISM abundance at birth of each star and using sets of…
I discuss three different topics concerning the chemical evolution of the Milky Way (MW). 1) The metallicity distribution of the MW halo; it is shown that this distribution can be analytically derived in the framework of the hierarchical…
To account for the observed differential metallicity distribution (DMD) of the Milky Way halo, a semi-analytical model is presented in the framework of the hierarchical merging paradigm for structure formation. It is assumed that the Milky…
We report on the distribution of metallicities, [Fe/H], for very metal-poor stars in the halo of the Galaxy. Although the primary information on the nature of the Metallicity Distribution Function (MDF) is obtained from the two major recent…
The stellar halos of spiral galaxies bear important chemo-dynamical signatures of galaxy formation. We present here the analysis of 89 semi-cosmological spiral galaxy simulations, spanning ~ 4 magnitudes in total galactic luminosity. These…
We explore the chemical distribution of stars in a simulated galaxy. Using simulations of the same initial conditions but with two different feedback schemes (MUGS and MaGICC), we examine the features of the age-metallicity relation (AMR),…
A possible relation between the high dispersion in metallicity of metal-poor halo stars and the minor merger processes in the history of the Galaxy is presented. The foreign populations of stars in the satellites through minor merger…
We obtain a new determination of the metallicity distribution function (MDF) of stars within $\sim5$-$10$ kpc of the Sun, based on recently improved co-adds of $ugriz$ photometry for Stripe 82 from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. Our new…
[Abridged] Motivated by upcoming data from astrometric and spectroscopic surveys of the Galaxy, we explore the chemical abundance properties and phase-space distributions in hierarchically-formed stellar halo simulations set in a LambdaCDM…
We explore the stellar metallicity distribution function of the Galactic halo based on SDSS ugriz photometry. A set of stellar isochrones is calibrated using observations of several star clusters and validated by comparisons with…
Accreted stellar populations are comprised of the remnants of destroyed galaxies, and often dominate the `stellar haloes' of galaxies such as the Milky Way (MW). This ensemble of external contributors is a key indicator of the past assembly…
The distributions of a galaxy's gas and stars in chemical space encodes a tremendous amount of information about that galaxy's physical properties and assembly history. However, present methods for extracting information from chemical…
Based on Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) photometric data, Gu developed a new Monte-Carlo-based method for estimating the stellar metallicity distribution functions (MDFs). This method enables a more reliable determination of MDFs compared…
We combine star-formation histories derived from observations of high redshift galaxies with measurements of the z~0 relation between gas-phase metallicity, stellar mass, and star formation rate to make an explicit and completely empirical…
The Hubble Space Telescope has been used to obtain WFPC2 (V,I) photometry for a sample of 10,000 red giant stars in the outer halo of the giant elliptical NGC 5128. Comparison with the fiducial RGBs of Milky Way globular clusters and model…