Related papers: Milky Way evolution on a human timescale
We explore the motivation behind large stellar surveys in Galactic astronomy, in particular, surveys that measure the photometric, phase space and abundance properties of thousands or millions of stars. These observations are essential to…
Near infrared images from the COBE satellite presented the first clear evidence that our Milky Way galaxy contains a boxy shaped bulge. Recent years have witnessed a gradual paradigm shift in the formation and evolution of the Galactic…
In a cosmological setting, the disc of a galaxy is expected to continuously experience gravitational torques and perturbations from a variety of sources, which can cause the disc to wobble, flare and warp. Specifically, the study of…
We develop a detailed model of the Milky Way (a ``prototypical'' disk galaxy) and extend it to other disks with the help of some simple scaling relations, obtained in the framework of Cold Dark Matter models. This phenomenological…
In the first two years of operation JWST has delivered key new insights into the formation and evolution of galaxies in the early Universe. By combining imaging with spectroscopy, we discovered and characterised the first generation of…
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…
The Milky Way has distinct structural stellar components linked to its formation and subsequent evolution, but disentangling them is nontrivial. With the recent availability of high-quality data for a large numbers of stars in the Milky…
We use a cosmological galactic evolutionary approach to model the Milky Way. A detailed treatment of the mass aggregation and dynamical history of the growing dark halo is included, together with a self consistent physical treatment for the…
It is currently believed that galaxies were assembled via chaotic hierarchical mergers between massive cold dark matter halos, in which baryonic star forming matter was embedded. One would therefore expect the properties of individual…
The Milky Way is a spiral galaxy comprising three main components: the Bulge, the Disk, and the Halo. Of particular interest is the Galactic disk, which holds a significant portion of the baryonic matter angular momentum and harbors at…
One of the main themes in extragalactic astronomy for the next decade will be the evolution of galaxies over cosmic time. Many future observatories, including JWST, ALMA, GMT, TMT and E-ELT will intensively observe starlight over a broad…
There are three major axes to describe the evolution of galaxies, namely, time (redshift), space (environment) and mass (stellar mass). In this article, one topic each will be presented along these axes. (1) Based on the Subaru wide-field…
I begin by summarizing the evidence that there is a close relationship between the evolution of galaxies and supermassive black holes. They evidently share a common fuel source, and feedback from the black hole may be needed to suppress…
The Milky Way bulge offers a unique opportunity to investigate in detail the role that different processes such as dynamical instabilities, hierarchical merging, and dissipational collapse may have played in the history of the Galaxy…
The last 20 years have seen an explosion in our understanding of the large-scale distribution and motions of galaxies in the nearby universe. The field has moved from a largely qualitative, morphological description of the structures seen…
How is the universe organized on large scales? How did this structure evolve from the unknown initial conditions to the present time? The answers to these questions will shed light on the cosmology we live in, the amount, composition and…
We use a series of high-resolution N-body simulations of a `Milky-Way' halo, coupled to semi-analytic techniques, to study the formation of our own Galaxy and of its stellar halo. Our model Milky Way galaxy is a relatively young system…
Recent observations indicate a remarkable similarity in the properties of evolving galaxies at fixed mass and redshift, prompting us to consider the possibility that most galaxies may evolve with a common history encompassing star…
The standard cosmological model ($\Lambda$-CDM) predicts that galaxies are built through hierarchical assembly on cosmological timescales$^{1,2}$. The Milky Way, like other disc galaxies, underwent violent mergers and accretion of small…
Virtually all massive galaxies, including our own, host central black holes ranging in mass from millions to billions of solar masses. The growth of these black holes releases vast amounts of energy that powers quasars and other weaker…