Related papers: Does the Milky Way have a Maximal Disk?
For nearly a century, more mass has been measured in galaxies than is contained in the luminous stars and gas. Through continual advances in observations and theory, it has become clear that the dark matter in galaxies is not comprised of…
Despite having entered the era of "precision cosmology," the formation of galaxies within the favored CDM cosmological paradigm remains problematic. By relating our N-body/smooth particle hydro-dynamical simulation to an extensive range of…
The evolution of the Milky Way disk, which contains most of the stars in the Galaxy, is affected by several phenomena. For example, the bar and the spiral arms of the Milky Way induce radial migration of stars and can trap or scatter stars…
As one of the most massive Milky Way satellites, the Sagittarius dwarf galaxy has played an important role in shaping the Galactic disk and stellar halo morphologies. The disruption of Sagittarius over several close-in passages has…
I review studies of the hot gaseous medium in and around nearby normal disk galaxies, including the Milky Way. This medium represents a reservoir of materials required for lasting star formation, a depository of galactic feedback (e.g.,…
Much of our understanding of dark matter halos comes from the assumption that the mass-to-light ratio (M/L) of spiral disks is constant. The best way to test this hypothesis is to measure the disk surface mass density directly via the…
Although numerous dynamical techniques have been developed to estimate the total dark matter halo mass of the Milky Way, it remains poorly constrained, with typical systematic uncertainties of 0.3 dex. In this study, we apply a neural…
The severity of the mass discrepancy in spiral galaxies is strongly correlated with the central surface brightness of the disk. Progressively lower surface brightness galaxies have ever larger mass discrepancies. No other parameter…
The distribution of shapes of galaxies' dark halos provides a basic test for models of galaxy formation. To-date, few dark halo shapes have been measured, and the results of different methods appear contradictory. Here, we add to the sample…
The Milky Way's bar dominates the orbits of stars and the flow of cold gas in the inner Galaxy, and is therefore of major importance for Milky Way dynamical studies in the Gaia era. Here we discuss the pronounced peanut shape of the…
Context. Thanks to recent large scale surveys in the near infrared such as 2MASS, the galactic plane that most suffers from extinction is revealed and its overall structure can be studied. Aims. This work aims at constraining the structure…
Different stellar sub-populations of the Milky Way's stellar disk are known to have different vertical scale heights, their thickness increasing with age. Using SEGUE spectroscopic survey data, we have recently shown that mono-abundance…
Studying the trajectories of objects like stars, globular clusters or satellite galaxies in the Milky Way allows to trace the dark matter halo but requires reliable models of its gravitational potential. Realistic, yet simple and fully…
The Milky Way has at least twenty-three known satellite galaxies that shine with luminosities ranging from about a thousand to a billion times that of the Sun. Half of these galaxies were discovered in the past few years in the Sloan…
NGC 2915 is a blue compact dwarf galaxy embedded in an extended, low surface brightness HI disk exhibiting a two-armed spiral structure and a central bar-like component. Commonly accepted mechanisms are unable to explain the existence of…
The structure and kinematics of the recognized stellar components of the Milky Way are explored, based on well-determined atmospheric parameters and kinematic quantities for 32360 calibration stars from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS)…
Galactic rotation curves are often considered the first robust evidence for the existence of dark matter. However, even in the presence of a dark matter halo, other galactic-scale observations, such as the Baryonic Tully-Fisher Relation and…
We quantify the inside-out growth of the Milky Way's low-alpha stellar disk, modelling the ages, metallicities and Galactocentric radii of APOGEE red clump stars with 6 < R < 13 kpc. The current stellar distribution differs significantly…
We examine the outer Galactic HI disk for deviations from the b=0 plane by constructing maps of disk surface density, mean height, and thickness. We find that the Galactic warp is well described by a vertical offset plus two Fourier modes…
The measurements of the possible gravitational microlensing events are analysed with a simple yet accurate disc--halo model of the Milky Way Galaxy. This comprises a luminous exponential disc embedded in a flattened dark matter halo with…