Related papers: Does the Milky Way have a Maximal Disk?
As the Milky Way and its satellite system become more entrenched in near field cosmology efforts, the need for an accurate mass estimate of the Milky Way's dark matter halo is increasingly critical. With the second and early third data…
This article summarizes recent work on the luminosity and mass distribution of the Galactic bulge and disk, and on the mass of the Milky Way's dark halo. A new luminosity model consistent with the COBE NIR data and the apparent magnitude…
I review the observational side of the present state of the debate about the dark matter in galaxies, with emphasis on the core/cusp problem in low surface brightness galaxies, and the question of maximum / sub-maximum disks in spiral…
We employ numerical simulations and simple analytical estimates to argue that dark matter substructures orbiting in the inner regions of the Galaxy can be efficiently destroyed by disk shocking, a dynamical process known to affect globular…
We construct a model for the Milky Way Galaxy composed of a stellar disc and bulge embedded in a dark-matter halo. All components are modelled as $N$-body systems with up to 8 billion equal-mass particles and integrated up to an age of…
This article summarizes the structural parameters of the Galactic bulge and disk, and discusses the interpretation of the bulge microlensing observations and the determination of the Milky Way's luminous mass from the terminal velocity…
Context. Gas within a galaxy is forced to establish pressure balance against gravitational forces. The shape of an unperturbed gaseous disk can be used to constrain dark matter models. Aims. We derive the 3-D HI volume density distribution…
The Milky Way is made up of a central bar, a disk with embedded spiral arms, and a dark matter halo. Observational and theoretical constraints for the characteristic parameters of these components will be presented, with emphasis on the…
A suite of vast stellar surveys mapping the Milky Way, culminating in the Gaia mission, is revolutionizing the empirical information about the distribution and properties of stars in the Galactic stellar disk. We review and lay out what…
The outer disk of the Milky Way Galaxy is warped and flared. Several mechanisms have been proposed to explain these phenomena, but none have quantitatively reproduced both features. Recent work has demonstrated that the Galactic stellar…
The existence of dark matter in the Galactic disk has been a topic of significant debate, especially over the past two decades. Evidence for dark matter in the disk, a component in addition to the now well-proven dark matter halo, has been…
Models of the Sagittarius Stream have consistently found that the Milky Way disc is oriented such that its short axis is along the intermediate axis of the triaxial dark matter halo. We attempt to build models of disc galaxies in such an…
The structural parameters of a galaxy can be used to gain insight into its formation and evolution history. In this paper, we strive to compare the Milky Way's structural parameters to other, primarily edge-on, spiral galaxies in order to…
The shape and orientation of the Milky Way's dark matter halo remain poorly constrained. Observations of the accreted stellar halo show that it is triaxial and tilted with respect to the disc. If this configuration is long-lived, it can…
Mass models for a sample of 18 late-type dwarf and low surface brightness galaxies show that in almost all cases the contribution of the stellar disks to the rotation curves can be scaled to explain most of the observed rotation curves out…
Mapping the dark matter distribution across our Galaxy represents a central challenge for the near future as a new generation of space-borne and ground-based astronomical surveys swiftly comes online. Here we present a synopsis of the…
Using recent observational data, we construct a set of multi-component equilibrium models of the disk of a Milky Way-like galaxy. The disk dynamics are studied using collisionless-gaseous numerical simulations, based on the joined…
We still do not have a "standard" model for the mass distribution of spiral galaxies. I review various methods used to delimit the range of values of the mass-to-light ratio of the disk, such as spiral structure criteria, the influence of…
It has been thought for many years that the Milky Way is an overly large spiral galaxy. Using Cephied distances to 17 spiral galaxies we calculate the true linear diameters of those galaxies. These diameters are then compared to that of the…
Predicting the local flux of dark matter particles is vital for dark matter direct detection experiments. To date, such predictions have been based on simulations that model the dark matter alone. Here we include the influence of the…