Related papers: The Milky Way as a Key to Structural Evolution in …
How do galaxies form and evolve? This is one of the most puzzling questions in astronomy. Galaxy assembly takes place throughout the entire history of the Universe, but our understanding of it is hampered by the unfortunate fact that we can…
The star-formation histories of the main stellar components of the Milky Way constrain critical aspects of galaxy formation and evolution. I discuss recent determinations of such histories, together with their interpretation in terms of…
This review discusses the structure and evolution of the Milky Way, in the context of opportunities provided by asteroseismology of red giants. The review is structured according to the main Galactic components: the thin disk, thick disk,…
Our Galaxy, the Milky Way, is a benchmark for understanding disk galaxies. It is the only galaxy whose formation history can be studied using the full distribution of stars from white dwarfs to supergiants. The oldest components provide us…
Our Milky Way Galaxy is a typical large spiral galaxy, representative of the most common morphological type in the local Universe. We can determine the properties of individual stars in unusual detail, and use the characteristics of the…
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…
Like the majority of spiral galaxies, the Milky Way contains a central non-axisymmetric bar component. Our position in the Galactic plane renders it rather hard to see, but also allows us to make measurements of the bar that are completely…
I selectively review the various dynamical scenarios that have been explored to date, especially those that illustrate the conundrums. In short, although the existence of asymmetries are convincing enough, the interpretation remains…
Studying our Galaxy, the Milky Way (MW), gives us a close-up view of the interplay between cosmology, dark matter, and galaxy formation. In the next decade our understanding of the MW's dynamics, stellar populations, and structure will…
Almost 80 years have passed since Trumpler's analysis of the Galactic open cluster system laid one of the main foundations for understanding the nature and structure of the Milky Way. Since then, the open cluster system has been recognised…
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 present a review of recent studies of the formation and evolution of the Milky Way galaxy, in particular based on large samples of non-kinematically selected stars with available proper motions. The Milky Way is argued to be a reasonable…
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 Gaia mission has triggered major developments in the field of Galactic dynamics in recent years, which we discuss in this review. The structure and kinematics of all Galactic components - disc, bar/bulge and halo - are now mapped in…
The structural parameters of a galaxy can be used to gain insight into its formation and evolution history. In this paper, we strive to compare the Milky Way's structural parameters to other, primarily edge-on, spiral galaxies in order to…
We discuss the main ingredients necessary to build models of chemical evolution of spiral galaxies and in particular the Milky Way galaxy. These ingredients include: the star formation rate, the initial mass function, the stellar yields and…
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 study of the morphology of galaxies is important in order to understand the formation and evolution of galaxies and their sub-components as a function of luminosity, environment, and star-formation and galaxy assembly over cosmic time.…
The evolution of the Milky Way disk, which contains most of the stars in the Galaxy, is affected by several phenomena. For example, the bar and the spiral arms of the Milky Way induce radial migration of stars and can trap or scatter stars…