Related papers: Milky Way evolution on a human timescale
We will discuss some highlights concerning the chemical evolution of our Galaxy, the Milky Way. First we will describe the main ingredients necessary to build a model for the chemical evolution of the Milky Way. Then we will illustrate some…
We illustrate the formation and evolution of the Milky Way over cosmic time, utilizing a sample of 10 million red giant stars with full chemodynamical information, including metallicities and $\alpha$-abundances from low-resolution Gaia XP…
In this review, we present a brief description of observational efforts to understand the Galactic thick disk and its relation to the other Galactic components. This review primarily focused on elemental abundance patterns of the thick disk…
Our understanding of the Milky Way disk is rapidly improving with the recent advent of the high quality and vast amount of observational data. We summarize our current view of the structure of the Milky Way disk, such as the masses and…
The current understanding of galaxy formation is that it proceeds in a 'bottom up' way, with the formation of small clumps of gas and stars that merge hierarchically until giant galaxies are built up. The baryonic gas loses the thermal…
How did galaxies form and evolve? This is one of the most challenging questions in astronomy to- day. Answering it requires a careful combination of observational and theoretical work to reliably determine the observed properties of cosmic…
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…
The history of galaxy formation via star formation and stellar mass assembly rates is now known with some certainty, yet the connection between high redshift and low redshift galaxy populations is not yet clear. By identifying and studying…
Galaxy formation is at the heart of our understanding of cosmic evolution. Although there is a consensus that galaxies emerged from the expanding matter background by gravitational instability of primordial fluctuations, a number of…
The combination of huge databases of galaxy spectra and advances in evolutionary synthesis models in the past few years has renewed interest in an old question: How to estimate the star formation history of a galaxy out of its integrated…
I review recent observational progress concerning the evolution of the morphological distribution of galaxies in the rich cluster environment and in the faint field population. By coupling HST imagery with ground-based spectroscopic…
With the start of the Gaia era, the time has come to address the major challenge of deriving the star formation history and evolution of the disk of our MilkyWay. Here we review our present knowledge of the outer regions of the Milky Way…
The internal evolution of disk galaxies like the Milky Way are driven by non-axisymmetries (bars) and the implied angular momentum transfer of the matter; baryons are essentially driven inwards to build a more concentrated disk. This mass…
Theories of how galaxies, the fundamental constituents of large-scale structure, form and evolve have undergone a dramatic paradigm shift in the last few decades. Earlier views were of rapid, early collapse and formation of basic…
In this review we concentrate on the dynamical evolution of the Milky Way as monitored in the solar neighbourhood. The relevant data sets are presented and discussed in detail. In the second part we review various mechanisms, which drive…
Stars are fossils that retain the history of their host galaxies. Elements heavier than helium are created inside stars and are ejected when they die. From the spatial distribution of elements in galaxies, it is therefore possible to…
A major problem in extragalactic astronomy is the inability to distinguish in a robust, physical, and model independent way how galaxy populations are related to each other and to their formation histories. A similar, but distinct, and also…
Our 'home galaxy' - the Milky Way - is a fairly large spiral galaxy, prototype of the most common morphological class in the local Universe. Although being only a galaxy, it is the only one that can be studied in unique detail: for the…
The star formation history of a galaxy, explicitely here our Milky Way Galaxy, where the most detailed information is attainable, is the convolution of two functions. One function describes the rate of formation of the stars which are today…
A short overview is presented of several topics concerning the evolution of the Milky Way (MW) in a cosmological context. In particular, the metallicity distribution of the MW halo is derived analytically and the halo metallicity and…