Related papers: Galactic Structure
In a Lambda CDM Universe, galaxies grow in mass both through star formation and through addition of already-formed stars in galaxy mergers. Because of this partial decoupling of these two modes of galaxy growth, I discuss each separately in…
The stellar populations of the stellar halo and of the thick disk of the Milky Way reveal much about the merging history that our Galaxy, a typical large disk galaxy, has experienced. Our current understanding, described here, implies a…
The morphological classification of galaxies provides vital physical information about the orbital motions of stars in galaxies, and correlates in interesting ways with star formation history, and other physical properties. Galaxy…
Galaxy morphology is a product of how galaxies formed, how they interacted with their environment, how they were influenced by internal perturbations, AGN, and dark matter, and of their varied star formation histories. This article reviews…
Invited Review at IAU Symp 164 on Stellar Populations. The Milky Way Galaxy offers a unique opportunity for testing theories of galaxy formation and evolution. The study of the spatial distribution, kinematics and chemical abundances of…
Stellar halos may hold some of the best preserved fossils of the formation history of galaxies. They are a natural product of the merging processes that probably take place during the assembly of a galaxy, and hence may well be the most…
The Galactic bulge is the central spheroid of our Galaxy, containing about one quarter of the total stellar mass of the Milky Way (M_bulge=1.8x10^10 M_sun; Sofue, Honma & Omodaka 2009). Being older than the disk, it is the first massive…
Globular clusters are compact, gravitationally bound systems of up to a million stars. The GCs in the Milky Way contain some of the oldest stars known, and provide important clues to the early formation and continuing evolution of our…
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…
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…
We analyse a sample of 52,000 Milky Way (MW) type galaxies drawn from the publicly available galaxy catalogue of the Millennium Simulation with the aim of studying statistically the differences and similarities of their properties in…
Our Galaxy - the Milky Way - has certain features of the structure and evolution. The morphological, photometric, kinematic, and chemodynamical properties are usually considered in the search for the Milky Way galaxies-analogues (MWAs). The…
In spite of much work, the overall spiral structure morphology of the Milky Way remains somewhat uncertain. In the last two decades, accurate distance measurements have provided us with an opportunity to solve this issue. Using the precise…
The study of the Milky Way structure is vital importance for a better understanding of the universe. This study digs deeper into the structure of Milky Way Galaxys with emphasis to its spiral arms. Multiple data sources were sought…
The star formation rate history of the Milky Way is derived using the chromospheric age distribution for 552 stars in the solar neighborhood. The stars sample birthsites distributed over a very large range of distances because of orbital…
[Abridged]We compare both the Milky Way and M31 galaxies to local external disk galaxies within the same mass range, using their relative locations in the planes formed by V_flat versus M_K, j_disk, and the average Fe abundance of stars in…
Recent progress in studies of globular clusters has shown that they are not simple stellar populations, being rather made of multiple generations. Evidence stems both from photometry and spectroscopy. A new paradigm is then arising for the…
The Milky Way is a barred galaxy whose central bulge has a box/peanut shape and consists of multiple stellar populations with different orbit distributions. This review describes dynamical and chemo-dynamical equilibrium models for the…
We use a semi-analytic model of halo formation to study the dynamical history of giant field galaxies like the Milky Way. We find that in a concordance LCDM cosmology, most isolated disk galaxies have remained undisturbed for 8-10 Gyr, such…
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…