Related papers: Evolution of the Galactic Halo and Disk
Stars are fossils that retain the history of their host galaxies. Elements heavier than helium are created inside stars and are ejected when they die. From the spatial distribution of elements in galaxies, it is therefore possible to…
We investigate the evolution of angular momentum in simulations of galaxy formation in a cold dark matter universe. We analyse two model galaxies generated in the N-body/hydrodynamic simulations of Okamoto et al. Starting from identical…
Old, metal-poor globular clusters trace the formation and evolution of early-type galaxies. Their are the best probes, at low redshift, of the building-up of galaxy halos at high redshift. Their properties constrain the characteristics of…
We review the evolution of the interstellar medium in disc galaxies, and show, both analytically and by numerical 3D hydrodynamic simulations, that the disc-halo connection is an essential ingredient in understanding the evolution of star…
Galaxies form due to the continuous accretion of gaseous material towards the centre of dark matter haloes, which gives rise to stellar discs once the gas reaches high density. Analysis of stellar age distribution shows that stars in the…
We compare the metallicity distribution of Galactic Halo stars with 3D realizations of hierarchical galaxy formation. Outflows from dwarf galaxies enrich the intergalactic medium inhomogeneously, at a rate depending on the local galaxy…
The evolution of C and O abundances in the Milky Way can impose strong constraints on stellar nucleosynthesis and help understanding the formation and evolution of our Galaxy. The aim is to review the measured C and O abundances in the disk…
Some factors connecting the evolutionary histories of galaxies with the characteristics of their cluster systems are reviewed. Unanswered questions include: How is one to understand the observation that some globular cluster systems have…
The evolution of the Milky Way bulge and its relationship with the other Galactic populations is still poorly understood. The bulge has been suggested to be either a merger-driven classical bulge or the product of a dynamical instability of…
We consider the key problems related to measuring the mass of stellar disks and dark halos in galaxies and to explaining the observed properties of disks formed in massive dark halos.
We introduce and apply a new approach to probe the response of galactic stellar haloes to the interplay between cosmological merger histories and galaxy formation physics. We perform dark matter-only, zoomed simulations of two Milky…
We carry out a detailed orbit analysis of gravitational potentials selected at different times from an evolving self-consistent model galaxy consisting of a two-component disk (stars+gas) and a live halo. The results are compared with a…
Some aspects of disk-halo interactions for models of in and out of equilibrium disk galaxies are reviewed. Specifically, we focus on disk-halo resonant interaction without and in the presence of a gas component. Another issue is the disk…
Using the DR12 public release of APOGEE data, we show that thin and thick disk separate very well in the space defined by [$\alpha$/Fe], [Fe/H] and [C/N]. Thick disk giants have both higher [C/N] and higher [$\alpha$/Fe] than do thin disk…
The structure and dynamics of dark matter halos, as predicted by the hierarchical clustering scenario, are at odds with the properties inferred from the observations at galactic scales. My Thesis addresses this problem by taking an…
A model of a galactic disk is presented which extends the homogeneous one zone models by incorporating propagation of material and energy in the disk. For reasonable values of the parameters the homogeneous steady state is unstable to the…
We present first results from a program to measure the chemical abundances of a large (N>30) sample of thick disk stars with the principal goal of investigating the formation history of the Galactic thick disk. Our analysis confirms…
The Galactic halo has a complex assembly history, which can be seen in its wealth of kinematic and chemical substructure. Globular clusters lose stars through tidal interactions with the Galaxy and cluster evaporation processes, meaning…
We trace the evolution of eight edge-on star-forming disk galaxies by analyzing stellar population properties of their thin and thick disks. These galaxies have relatively low stellar masses (4~$\times$~10$^9$ to…
Spiral galaxies comprise three major structural components; thin discs, thick discs, and central bulges. Relative dominance of these components is known to correlate with the total mass of the galaxy, and produces a remarkable morphological…