Related papers: Dynamics of the Galaxy
Over the last decade a series of results have lent support to the hypothesis of the existence of a long thin bar in the Milky Way with a half-length of 4.5 kpc and a position angle of around 45 deg. This is apparently a very different…
The inner Milky Way is dominated by a boxy, triaxial bulge which is believed to have formed through disk instability processes. Despite its proximity, its large-scale properties are still not very well known, due to our position in the…
We report the discovery of nineteen new HI shells in the Southern Galactic Plane Survey (SGPS). These shells, which range in radius from 40 pc to 1 kpc, were found in the low resolution Parkes portion of the SGPS dataset, covering Galactic…
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…
We set new limits on the mass of the Milky Way, making use of the latest kinematic information for Galactic satellites and halo objects. In order to bind these sample objects to the Galaxy, their rest-frame velocities must be lower than…
In the past years a wealth of observations has unraveled the structural properties of the Dark and Luminous mass distribution in spirals. These have pointed out to an intriguing scenario not easily explained by present theories of galaxy…
We summarize recent work on the structure and dynamics of the Galactic bar and inner disk. Current work focusses on constructing a quantitative model which integrates NIR photometry, source count observations, gas kinematics, stellar…
A new picture accounting for the dominant features in the observed l-V distribution of the Milky Way gas within the central few kpcs is proposed, based on symmetry-free and high resolution 3D N-body and SPH simulations.
Starting from the hypothesis that the Galaxy's dark halo responded adiabatically to the infall of baryons, we have constructed a self-consistent dynamical model of the Galaxy that satisfies a large number of observations, including…
The inner ~200 pc region of the Milky Way contains a nuclear stellar disc and a nuclear star cluster that are embedded in the larger Galactic bar. These stellar systems overlap spatially, which makes it challenging to separate stars that…
The Milky Way spiral arms are well established from star counts as well as from the locus of molecular clouds and other young objects, however, they have only recently started to be observed from a kinematics point of view. Using the…
We use a series of high-resolution N-body simulations of a `Milky-Way' halo, coupled to semi-analytic techniques, to study the formation of our own Galaxy and of its stellar halo. Our model Milky Way galaxy is a relatively young system…
We use fully self-consistent N-body simulations of barred galaxies to show that dynamical friction from a dense dark matter halo dramatically slows the rotation rate of bars. Our result supports previous theoretical predictions for a bar…
We propose a new dynamical picture of galactic stellar and gas spirals, based on hydrodynamic simulations in a `live' stellar disk. We focus especially on spiral structures excited in a isolated galactic disk without a stellar bar. Using…
We review recent research on the Milky Way galaxy and try to investigate whether its shape is similar to other barred galaxies. The emphasis is given on microlensing research because this method can be useful in determining the shape of the…
We construct a large set of dynamical models of the galactic bulge, bar and inner disk using the Made-to-Measure method. Our models are constrained to match the red clump giant density from a combination of the VVV, UKIDSS and 2MASS…
We use 3.6 $\mu$m imaging from the S$^{4}$G survey to characterize the typical stellar density profiles ($\Sigma_{\ast}$) and bars as a function of fundamental galaxy parameters (e.g. the total stellar mass $M_{\ast}$), providing…
Recent VLBI (Very Long Baseline Interferometer) observations determined the distances and proper motions of star-forming regions in spiral arms directly. They showed that star-forming regions and young stars have large peculiar motions, as…
`Conspiracy' between the dark and the baryonic mater prohibits an unambiguous decomposition of disc galaxy rotation curves into the corresponding components. Several methods have been proposed to counter this difficulty, but their results…
We review the most recent evidence for the amazing properties of the density distribution of dark matter around spiral galaxies. Their rotation curves, coadded according to the galaxy luminosity, conform to an universal profile which can be…