Related papers: The Milky Way as the Ultimate Extragalactic Source
General importance and capabilities of observations of eclipsing binaries by the forthcoming ESA mission GAIA are discussed. Availability of spectroscopic observations and a large number of photometric bands on board will make it possible…
While recent sky surveys have uncovered large numbers of ever fainter Milky Way satellites, their classification as star clusters, low-luminosity galaxies, or tidal overdensities remains often unclear. Likewise, their contributions to the…
Mergers and tidal interactions between massive galaxies and their dwarf satellites are a fundamental prediction of the Lambda-Cold Dark Matter cosmology. These events are thought to influence galaxy evolution throughout cosmic history and…
With Gaia Data Release 2, the astronomical community is entering a new era of multidimensional surveys of the Milky Way. This new phase-space view of our Galaxy demands new tools for comparing observations to simulations of Milky-Way-mass…
The majority of the Milky Way's stellar halo consists of debris from our Galaxy's last major merger, the Gaia-Sausage-Enceladus (GSE). In the past few years, stars from GSE have been kinematically and chemically studied in the inner $30$…
The properties of dwarf galaxies orbiting the Milky Way (MW) are useful for testing models of the formation of our Galaxy, and by extension various theories of cosmology. Recent efforts to measure the masses of the MW's satellite dwarf…
I present a brief review of some of the most recent and active topics of star formation process in the Milky Way using mid and far infrared observations, and motivated by the research being carried out by our science group using data…
Although originally conceived as primarily an extragalactic survey, the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS-I), and its extensions SDSS-II and SDSS-III, continue to have a major impact on our understanding of the formation and evolution of our…
Hundreds of globular clusters and dwarf galaxies encircle the Milky Way. Many of these systems have undergone partial disruption due to tidal forces, littering the halo with stellar streams. These tidal tails are sensitive to the Galactic…
Various observational techniques have been used to survey galaxies and AGN, from X-rays to radio frequencies, both photometric and spectroscopic. I will review these techniques aimed at the study of galaxy evolution and of the role of AGNs…
We study the correlation of orbital poles of the 11 classical satellite galaxies of the Milky Way, comparing results from previous proper motions with the independent data by Gaia DR2. Previous results on the degree of correlation and its…
It is increasingly apparent that common merger events play a large role in the evolution of disk galaxies at all cosmic times, from the wet accretion of gas-filled dwarf galaxies during the era of peak star formation, to the collisions…
We search for the fastest stars in the subset of stars with radial velocity measurements of the second data release (DR2) of the European Space Agency mission Gaia. Starting from the observed positions, parallaxes, proper motions, and…
We analyse from an observational perspective the formation history and kinematics of a Milky Way-like galaxy from a high-resolution zoom-in cosmological simulation that we compare to those of our Galaxy as seen by Gaia DR2 to better…
The advent of deep, wide, accurate, digital photometric surveys exemplified by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) has had a profound impact on studies of the Milky Way. In the past decade, we have transitioned from a scarcity to an…
We address the problem of identifying remnants of satellite galaxies in the halo of our galaxy with Gaia data. We make use of N-body simulations of dwarf galaxies being disrupted in the halo of our galaxy combined with a Monte Carlo model…
We present a wavelet-based algorithm to identify dwarf galaxies in the Milky Way in ${\it Gaia}$ DR2 data. Our algorithm detects overdensities in 4D position--proper motion space, making it the first search to explicitly use velocity…
Dwarf galaxies are valuable laboratories for dynamical studies related to dark matter and galaxy evolution, yet it is currently unknown just how physically extended their stellar components are. Satellites orbiting the Galaxy's potential…
White dwarf stars are a well-established tool for studying Galactic stellar populations. Two white dwarfs in a tight binary system offer us an additional messenger - gravitational waves - for exploring the Milky Way and its immediate…
The Gaia satellite will observe the positions and velocities of over a billion Milky Way stars. In the early data releases, the majority of observed stars do not have complete 6D phase-space information. In this Letter, we demonstrate the…