Related papers: Red clump distances to the inner Galactic structur…
The Two Micron All Sky Survey, along with the Stellar Population Synthesis Model of the Galaxy, developed in Besancon, is used to calculate the extinction distribution along different lines of sight. By combining many lines of sight, the…
Large pristine samples of red clump stars are highly sought after given that they are standard candles and give precise distances even at large distances. However, it is difficult to cleanly select red clumps stars because they can have the…
A key question in galaxy evolution has been the importance of the apparent `clumpiness' of high redshift galaxies. Until now, this property has been primarily investigated in rest-frame UV, limiting our understanding of their relevance. Are…
We compare red clump stars with parallaxes known to better than 10% in the Hipparcos catalog and corrected for the interstellar extinction, with the OGLE red clump stars in Baade's Window also corrected for the interstellar extinction.…
The nuclear stellar disc (NSD) is a dense stellar structure at the centre of our Galaxy. Given its proximity, it constitutes a unique laboratory to understand other galactic nuclei. Nevertheless, the high crowding and extinction hamper its…
Recent optical observations have led to a significant progress in our understanding of galaxy formation and evolution. However, our view on the deep universe is currently limited to the starlight which directly escapes from high-redshift…
While the shape of the extinction curve on the infrared is considered to be set and the extinction ratios between infrared bands are usually taken to be approximately constant, a recent number of studies point either to a spatially variable…
To study large-scale structure in the Universe a full census of the contents are required. This is even more important when the processes of galaxy formation are being investigated. In the last year the population of distant galaxies that…
Intracluster stars are believed to be unbound from their progenitor galaxies and diffused throughout the galaxy cluster, creating intracluster light (ICL). However, when and how these stars form are still in debate. To directly constrain…
Studies of the red clump giant population in the inner Milky Way suggest the Galactic bulge/bar has a boxy/peanut/X-shaped structure as predicted by its formation via a disc buckling instability. We used a non-parametric method of…
We analyse the near infrared colour magnitude diagram of a field including the giant molecular cloud G0.253+0.016 (a.k.a. The Brick) observed at high spatial resolution, with HAWK-I at the VLT. The distribution of red clump stars in a line…
Diffuse intracluster light (ICL) has now been observed in nearby and in intermediate redshift clusters. Individual intracluster stars have been detected in the Virgo and Coma clusters and the first color-magnitude diagram and velocity…
We present a study to estimate the dust content in galaxy clusters by using one the most complete existing catalogues of galaxy clusters based on SDSS data and following two methods: the first one compares the colours of samples of galaxies…
This review describes our current understanding of interstellar extinction. This differ substantially from the ideas of the 20th century. With infrared surveys of hundreds of millions of stars over the entire sky, such as 2MASS,…
Based on the most complete sample of Galactic open star clusters up to 1.8 kpc, we performed statistical analysis of the distribution of open cluster parameters in order to understand the Galactic structure. The geometrical characteristics…
In the outskirts of galaxy clusters, entropy profiles measured from X-ray observations of the hot intracluster medium (ICM) drops off unexpectedly. One possible explanation for this effect is gas clumping, where pockets of cooler and denser…
The Galactic bulge and bar are critical to our understanding of the Milky Way. However, due to the lack of reliable stellar distances, the structure and kinematics of the bulge/bar beyond the Galactic center have remained largely…
Red clump giant stars can be used as distance indicators to trace the mass distribution of the Galactic bar. We use RCG stars from 44 bulge fields from the OGLE-II microlensing collaboration database to constrain analytic tri-axial models…
Galaxies and clusters embedded in the large-scale structure of the Universe are observed to align in preferential directions. Galaxy alignment has been established as a potential probe for cosmological information, but the application of…
Here we review the efforts of a number of recent results that use old tracers to understand the build up of the Galaxy. Details that lead directly to using these old tracers to measure distances are discussed. We concentrate on the…