Related papers: Galactic Structure
Recent observations show that spiral galaxies are surrounded by extended gaseous halos as predicted by the hierarchical structure formation scenario. The origin and nature of extraplanar gas is often unclear since the halo is continuously…
Starting with the assertion that the problem of isolated, single star formation is essentially solved, this paper examines some of the missing steps needed to go from there to understanding the star formation history of the Universe. Along…
We live in an age where an enormous amount of astrometric, photometric, asteroseismic, and spectroscopic data of Milky Way stars are being acquired, many orders of magnitude larger than about a decade ago. Thanks to the Gaia astrometric…
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…
We develop a detailed model of the Milky Way (a ``prototypical'' disk galaxy) and extend it to other disks with the help of some simple scaling relations, obtained in the framework of Cold Dark Matter models. This phenomenological…
The secular evolution process, which slowly transforms the morphology of a galaxy over its lifetime, could naturally account for observed properties of the great majority of physical galaxies if both stellar and gaseous accretion processes…
The star formation history of a galaxy, explicitely here our Milky Way Galaxy, where the most detailed information is attainable, is the convolution of two functions. One function describes the rate of formation of the stars which are today…
We discuss some of the key open questions regarding the formation and evolution of globular clusters (GCs) during galaxy formation and assembly within a cosmological framework. The current state-of-the-art for both observations and…
By analyzing a N-body simulation of a bulge formed simply via a bar instability mechanism operating on a kinematically cold stellar disk, and by comparing the results of this analysis with the structural and kinematic properties of the main…
Using a cosmological galactic evolutionary approach to model the Milky Way, we calculate the star formation history (SFH) of the solar neighborhood. The good agreement we obtain with the observational inferences suggests that our physical…
We produce a detailed map of the perturbed surface density of neutral hydrogen in the outer Milky Way disk demonstrating that the Galaxy is a non-axisymmetric multi-armed spiral. Spiral structure in the southern half of the Galaxy can be…
We compare the structure and kinematics of the 11 known satellites of the Milky Way with high resolution simulations of the formation of its dark halo in a LambdaCDM universe. In contrast to earlier work, we find excellent agreement. The…
Stars, and collections of stars, encode rich signatures of stellar physics and galaxy evolution. With properties influenced by both their environment and intrinsic nature, stars retain information about astrophysical phenomena that are not…
The Milky Way is a spiral galaxy with the Schechter characteristic luminosity $L_*$, thus an important anchor point of the Hubble sequence of all spiral galaxies. Yet the true appearance of the Milky Way has remained elusive for centuries.…
Understanding the 3D structure of the Milky Way is a crucial step in deriving properties of the star-forming regions, as well as the Galaxy as a whole. We present a novel 3D map of the Milky Way plane that extends to 10 kpc distance from…
Giant molecular clouds (GMCs) are the primary reservoirs of cold, star-forming molecular gas in the Milky Way and similar galaxies, and thus any understanding of star formation must encompass a model for GMC formation, evolution, and…
To study the global morphology of the galaxy distribution in our local neighbourhood we calculate the Minkowski functionals for a sequence of volume limited samples within a sphere of 8 Mpc centred on our galaxy. The well known strong…
An objective prism H alpha survey has shown that there is a population of early type spiral galaxies in nearby clusters with strong central bursts of star formation which could be due to galaxy--galaxy tidal interactions. Such galaxies are…
Galaxies are not uniformly distributed in space. On large scales the Universe displays coherent structure, with galaxies residing in groups and clusters on scales of ~1-3 Mpc/h, which lie at the intersections of long filaments of galaxies…
The phase spiral is a perturbation to the vertical phase-space distribution of stars in the Milky Way disk. We study the phase spiral's properties and how they vary with spatial position, in order to constrain its origin and evolution, as…