Related papers: How Do the Stellar Disc and Thick Disc Stop ?
This contribution presents an overview of the evolution of Li abundances in stars of the Galactic thin and thick discs, from the observational point of view. The focus is on Li abundances obtained by recent projects and surveys. To separate…
A typical galactic disc has a finite thickness and in addition to stars it also contains a finite amount of interstellar gas. Here, we investigate the physical impact of the finite thickness of a galactic disc on the disc stability against…
Current observations of the Galactic Center (GC) seem to display a core-like distribution of bright stars from $\sim 5"$ inwards. On the other hand, we observe young, massive stars at the GC, with roughly 20-50\% of them in a disc, mostly…
A simple model for the evolution of disc galaxies is presented. We adopt three numbers from observations of the Milky Way disc, the local surface mass density, the stellar scale length (of the assumedly exponential disc) and the amplitude…
This paper presents an investigation of the outer disk structure by using data from a recent release of the 2 micron sky survey (2MASS). This 2MASS data show unambiguously that the stellar disk thickens with increasing distance from the…
Small and bright stellar disks with scale lengths of few tens of parsec are known to reside in the center of galaxies. They are believed to have formed in a dissipational process as the end result of star formation in gas either accreted in…
The Milky Way's nuclear stellar disc (NSD) and nuclear star cluster (NSC) are the main features of the Galactic centre. Nevertheless, their observation is hampered by the extreme source crowding and high extinction. Hence, their relation…
We present a high quality CMD for a 36'x 36' field located 8 degrees (7 kpc) from the LMC center, as well as a precise determination of the LMC surface brightness derived from the resolved stellar population out to this large galactocentric…
[ABRIDGED] In order to trace the origin and evolution of carbon in the Galactic disk we have determined carbon abundances in 51 nearby F and G dwarf stars. The sample is divided into two kinematically distinct subsamples with 35 and 16…
Models of disc galaxies which invoke viscosity-driven radial flows have long been known to provide a natural explanation for the origin of stellar exponential discs, under the assumption that the star formation and viscous timescales are…
A detailed understanding of the physics of star and planet formation requires study of individual objects as well as statistical assessment of global properties and evolutionary trends. Observational investigations of circumstellar material…
We investigate the role of stellar mass in shaping the intrinsic thickness of galaxy discs by determining the probability distribution of apparent axis ratios (b/a) for two different samples that probe the faint end of the galaxy luminosity…
We study a sample of approximately 16,500 galaxies with I_AB <= 22.5 in the COSMOS field. Structural information on the galaxies is derived by fitting single Sersic models to their two-dimensional surface brightness distributions. We…
The late-type stellar population in the Galactic Center was first predicted to reside in a dynamically relaxed cusp (power law slope ranging from 3/2 to 7/4). However, observations - which rely on models to correct for projection effects -…
Depending on the stellar densities, protoplanetary discs in stellar clusters undergo background heating, disc truncation-driven by stellar encounter, and photo-evaporation. Disc truncation leads to reduced characteristic sizes and disc…
We present a detailed analysis of the evolution of a simulated isolated disc galaxy. The simulation includes stars, gas, star formation and simple chemical yields. Stellar particles are split in two populations: the old one is present at…
A large fraction of brown dwarfs and low-mass H-burning stars may form by gravitational fragmentation of protostellar discs. We explore the conditions for disc fragmentation and we find that they are satisfied when a disc is large enough…
Over the past several years, the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) has acquired many broad-band images of various regions in the M31 disk. I have obtained 27 such fields from the HST data archive in order to produce color-magnitude diagrams…
We present a measurement of the age distribution of stars residing in spiral disks and dwarf galaxies. We derive a complete star formation history of the ~140 Mpc^3 covered by the volume-limited sample of galaxies in the Advanced Camera for…
We analyze high quality abundances data of solar neighborhood stars and show that there are two distinct regimes of [alpha/Fe] versus age which we identify as the epochs of the thick and thin disk formation. A tight correlation between…