Related papers: Astrometric Tests of Galactic Evolution
During the last few decades, great effort has been made towards understanding hydrodynamical processes which determine the structure and evolution of stars. Up to now, the most stringent constraints have been provided by helioseismology and…
We present an analytic formalism that describes the evolution of the stellar, gas, and metal content of galaxies. It is based on the idea, inspired by hydrodynamic simulations, that galaxies live in a slowly-evolving equilibrium between…
We study the behavior of orbits in two different galactic dynamical models, describing the motion in the central parts of a triaxial elliptical galaxy with a dense nucleus. Numerical experiments show that both models display regular motion…
The GAIA satellite will provide unprecedented phase-space information for our Galaxy and enable a new era of Galactic dynamics. We may soon see successful realizations of Galactoseismology, i.e., inferring the characteristics of the…
A framework is introduced for coupling the evolution of galactic magnetic fields sustained by the mean-field dynamo with the formation and evolution of galaxies in cold dark matter cosmology. Estimates of the steady-state strength of the…
Gravitational theories differing from General Relativity may explain the accelerated expansion of the Universe without a cosmological constant. However, to pass local gravitational tests, a "screening mechanism" is needed to suppress, on…
In recent years several hypervelocity stars (HVSs) have been observed in the halo of our Galaxy. Such HVSs have possibly been ejected from the Galactic center and then propagated in the Galactic potential up to their current position. The…
The redshift distribution of galaxy lenses in known gravitational lens systems provides a powerful test that can potentially discriminate amongst cosmological models. However, applications of this elegant test have been curtailed by two…
The primary present-day observables upon which theories of galaxy evolution are based are a system's morphology, dynamics, colour, and chemistry. Individually, each provides an important constraint to any given model; in concert, the four…
We investigate how strong gravitational lensing can test contemporary models of massive elliptical (ME) galaxy formation, by combining a traditional decomposition of their visible stellar distribution with a lensing analysis of their mass…
Context. Astrobiological evolution of the Milky Way (or the shape of its "astrobiological landscape") has emerged as one of the key research topics in recent years. In order to build precise, quantitative models of the Galactic…
The dynamical ellipticity of a planet expresses the departure of its mass distribution from spherical symmetry. It enters as a parameter in the description of a planet's precession and nutation, as well as other rotational normal modes. In…
The large-scale structure of the Universe is a rich source of information to test the consistency of General Relativity on cosmological scales. We briefly describe how the observed distributions of galaxies is affected by redshift-space…
Stellar structure and evolution theory is one of the basis in modern astronomy. Stellar inner structures and their evolutionary states can be precisely tested by asteroseismology, since the inner information is brought to the stellar…
Arguably the main challenge of galactic magnetism studies is to explain how the interstellar medium of galaxies reaches energetic equipartition despite the extremely weak cosmic primordial magnetic fields that are originally predicted to…
Galactic bulges are complex systems. Once thought to be small-scale versions of elliptical galaxies, advances in astronomical instrumentation (spectroscopy in particular) has revealed a wealth of photometric and kinematic substructure in…
We test Einstein gravity using cosmological observations of both expansion and structure growth, including the latest data from supernovae (Union2.1), CMB (WMAP7), weak lensing (CFHTLS) and peculiar velocity of galaxies (WiggleZ). We fit…
Stellar halos around galaxies retain fundamental evidence of the processes which lead to their build up. Sophisticated models of galaxy formation in a cosmological context yield quantitative predictions about various observable…
The detailed structure of the Galactic bulge still remain uncertain. The strong difficulties of obtaining observations of stars in the Galactic bulge have hindered the acquisition of a kinematic representation for the inner kpc of the Milky…
The paths of stars in galaxies have circular velocity independent of their distance from the centre of the galaxy. Newtonian mechanics with a logarithmic potential has such paths. In relativity these paths can be taken to be geodesics and…