Related papers: Clockwise Stellar Disk and the Dark Mass in the Ga…

High-accuracy rotation curves of spiral galaxies show a steep rise in the central few hundred pc region, indicating high concentration of mass toward the center. Using the rotation curves, we idrectly calculate radial distributions of the…

The nuclear region of the Milky Way is believed to host a nuclear stellar disk, co-spatial with the gaseous central molecular zone. Previous kinematical studies detected faster rotation for the stars belonging to the nuclear stellar disk,…

We present high-accuracy rotation curves, which show a steep nuclear rise and high-velocity central rotation, followed by a broad maximum in the disk and flat part. We use the rotation curves to directly calculate the radial distribution of…

Here we discuss impacts of distance determinations on the Galactic disk traced by relatively young objects. The Galactic disk, about 40 kpc in diameter, is a cross-road of studies on the methods of measuring distances, interstellar…

Over the last 15 years, around a hundred very young stars have been observed in the central parsec of our Galaxy. While the presence of young stars forming one or two stellar disks at approx. 0.1 pc from the supermassive black hole (SMBH)…

The stellar cluster GLIMPSE-C01 is a dense stellar system located in the Galactic Plane. Though often referred to in the literature as an old globular cluster traversing the Galactic disk, previous observations do not rule out that it is an…

The Galactic centre Nuclear Star Cluster is one of the densest stellar clusters in the Galaxy. The stars in its inner portions orbit the supermassive black hole associated with compact radio source Sgr~A* at the orbital speeds of several…

Observations of massive stars within the central parsec of the Galaxy show that, while most stars orbit within a well-defined disc, a significant fraction have large eccentricities and / or inclinations with respect to the disc plane. Here,…

We review the physical processes that occur at the center of the Galaxy and that are related to the supermassive black hole Sgr A* residing there. The discovery of high-velocity S0 stars orbiting Sgr A* for the first time allowed measuring…

Large galaxies may contain an "atmosphere" of hot interstellar X-ray gas, and the temperature and radial density profile of this gas can be used to measure the total mass of the galaxy contained within a given radius r. We use this…

A new theory of quasars is presented in which the matter of thin accretion disks around black holes is supplied by stars that plunge through the disk. Stars in the central part of the host galaxy are randomly perturbed to highly radial…

We use a set of high-resolution N-body simulations of the Galactic disk to study its interactions with the population of satellites predicted cosmologically. One simulation illustrates that multiple passages of massive satellites with…

Wide-field images obtained with the 3.6 meter Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope are used to investigate the spatial distribution and photometric properties of the brightest stars in the disk of M81 (NGC 3031). With the exception of the central…

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…

We have pursued two different methods to analyze the old stellar population near the Galactic plane, using data from the 2MASS survey. The first method is based on the isolation of the red clump giant population in the color-magnitude…

This work presents the results from extending the long-term monitoring program of stellar motions within the Galactic Center to include stars with separations of 2 - 7 arcseconds from the compact radio source, Sgr A*. In comparison to the…

We present a detailed study of the structural properties of four gravitationally lensed disk galaxies at z=1. Modelling the rotation curves on sub-kpc scales we derive the values for the disk mass, the reference dark matter density and core…

The Galactic Center is an excellent laboratory for studying phenomena and physical processes that may be occurring in many other galactic nuclei. The Center of our Milky Way is by far the closest galactic nucleus, and observations with…

The large-scale magnetic field of our Galaxy can be probed in three dimensions using Faraday rotation of pulsar signals. We report on the determination of 223 rotation measures from polarization observations of relatively distant southern…

We measure the contribution of galaxy disks to the overall gravitational potential of 30 nearly face-on intermediate-to-late-type spirals from the DiskMass Survey. The central vertical velocity dispersion of the disk stars, sigma(z,R=0), is…