Related papers: The Milky Way as the Ultimate Extragalactic Source
The analysis of the orbits of 47 dwarf satellite galaxies of the Milky Way, built using three models of the Galactic gravitational potential with different masses, is presented. The models of the Galactic potential were chosen based on the…
We identify a simulated Milky Way analog in the EAGLE suite of cosmological hydrodynamical simulations. This galaxy not only shares similar global properties as the Milky Way, but was specifically selected because its merger history…
Stellar variability studies are now reaching a completely new level thanks to ESA's Gaia mission, which enables us to locate many variable stars in the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram and determine the various instability strips/bands.…
The Gaia mission will have a profound impact on our understanding of the structure and dynamics of the Milky Way. Gaia is providing an exhaustive census of stellar parallaxes, proper motions, positions, colors and radial velocities, but…
The final astrometric data from the Gaia mission will transform our view of the stellar content of the Galaxy, particularly when complemented with spectroscopic surveys providing stellar parameters, line-of-sight kinematics and elemental…
Stellar clusters are important for astrophysics in many ways, for instance as optimal tracers of the Galactic populations to which they belong or as one of the best test bench for stellar evolutionary models. Gaia DR1, with TGAS, is just…
As we strive to understand how galaxies evolve it is crucial that we resolve physical processes and test emerging theories in nearby systems that we can observe in great detail. Our own Galaxy, the Milky Way, and the nearby Magellanic…
Setting the timeline of the events which shaped the Milky Way disc through its 13 billion year old history is one of the major challenges in the theory of galaxy formation. Achieving this goal is possible using late-type stars, which in…
One of the generic predictions of modern cosmological models is that large galaxies should have experienced many mergers with smaller galaxies at some point in their past. Debris from such encounters will leave spatially distinct…
The upcoming LISA mission is the only experiment that will allow us to study the Milky Way's structure using gravitational wave signals from Galactic double white dwarfs (DWDs). The total number of expected detections exceeds $10^5$.…
In the coming decade the Gaia satellite will precisely measure the positions and velocities of millions of stars in the Galactic halo, including stars in many tidal streams. These streams, the products of hierarchical accretion of satellite…
One of the most promising space missions of ESA is the astrometric satellite Gaia, which will provide very precise astrometry and multicolour photometry, for all 1.3 billion objects to V~20, and radial velocities with accuracies of a few…
The surroundings of globular clusters in the outer halo are one of the best places to look for the remnants of ancient dwarf satellites. The classical Searle & Zinn (1978) scenario of the formation of the Milky Way, in which the halo…
The second data release of ESA's Gaia satellite (Gaia DR2) revolutionised astronomy by providing accurate distances, proper motions, apparent magnitudes, and in many cases temperatures and radial velocities for an unprecedented number of…
The ESA Gaia mission, to be launched during 2013, will observe billions of objects, among which many galaxies, during its scanning of the sky. This will provide a large space-based dataset with unprecedented spatial resolution. Because of…
Access to microarcsecond astrometry is now routine in the radio, infrared, and optical domains. In particular the publication of the second data release from the Gaia mission made it possible for every astronomer to work with easily…
On January 15 2025, the Gaia mission completed the collection of the astrometric, photometric, and spectroscopic data for about 2.5 billion celestial sources, from the solar system to the Milky Way to the distant universe. Work is ongoing…
The observation of our home galaxy, the Milky Way (MW), is made difficult by our internal viewpoint. The Gaia survey that contains around 1.6 billion star distances is the new flagship of MW structure and can be combined with other…
Observations of the Galactic Center (GC) have accumulated a multitude of "forensic" evidence indicating that several million years ago the center of the Milky Way galaxy was teaming with starforming and accretion-powered activity -- this…
The GAIA astrometric mission has recently been approved as one of the next two `cornerstones' of ESA's science programme, with a launch date target of not later than mid-2012. GAIA will provide positional and radial velocity measurements…