Related papers: Galactic Structure
Current theories of galaxy formation have tended to focus on hierarchical structure formation, which is the most likely scenario for cosmological models with lots of power at small scales (e.g. standard cold dark matter). Models with little…
The morphology and kinematics of the spiral structure of the Milky Way is a long-standing problem in astrophysics. In this review we firstly summarize various methods with different tracers used to solve this puzzle. The astrometry of…
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…
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 formation of galaxies in a CDM cosmogony is investigated by following the evolution of dark and baryonic matter and of the frequency- dependent spatially averaged radiation field. The gas is allowed to form stars which are independently…
The nature of the spiral structure of the Milky Way has long been debated. Only in the last decade have astronomers been able to accurately measure distances to a substantial number of high-mass star-forming regions, the classic tracers of…
The Milky Way provides an ideal laboratory to test our understanding of galaxy evolution, owing to our ability to observe our Galaxy over fine scales. However, connecting the Galaxy to the wider galaxy population remains difficult, due to…
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…
What the future holds for the stellar populations of the Milky Way Galaxy may (optimistically) be predicted by study of their past histories, as written in the chemical abundance distributions, angular momentum distributions, velocity…
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 formation of galaxies can be understood in terms of the assembly patterns of each type of galactic component. To perform this kind of analysis, is necessary to define some criteria to separate those components. Decomposition methods…
A new view on our Galaxy has recently emerged, with large consequences on its formation scenarios. Not only new dwarf satellites have been detected, still orbiting and tidally disrupting, but also a multitude of stellar streams or tidal…
Understanding how the large-scale kinematics of the MW shape the formation and evolution of the interstellar medium remains challenging from an observational perspective, and numerical models that can reproduce the observed structure and…
Deep color magnitude diagrams extending to the main sequence provide the most direct measure of the detailed star formation history in a stellar population. With large investments of observing time, HST can obtain such data for populations…
There are about 6000 stars, that can be seen with the naked eye and have been observed for centuries for various purposes. More modern investigations using advanced telescopes show that our Milky Way, a quite common galaxy, consists of…
If we are to develop a comprehensive and predictive theory of galaxy formation and evolution, it is essential that we obtain an accurate assessment of how and when galaxies assemble their stellar populations, and how this assembly varies…
The phase-space structure of our Galaxy holds the key to understand and reconstruct its formation. The Lambda-CDM model predicts a richly structured phase-space distribution of dark matter and (halo) stars, consisting of streams of…
Over the past three decades the established view of a nearly homogeneuous, featureless Universe on scales larger than a few Megaparsec has been completely overhauled. In particular through the advent of ever larger galaxy redshift surveys…
We explore galaxy properties and their link with environment and clustering using a population of ~1000 galaxies formed in a high resolution hydrodynamic simulation of the Lambda CDM cosmology. At the redshift we concentrate on, z=1, the…
Their ubiquity and extreme densities make star clusters probes of prime importance of galaxy evolution. Old globular clusters keep imprints of the physical conditions of their assembly in the early Universe, and younger stellar objects,…