Related papers: Formation Scenarios
Stellar populations and their distribution differ widely across the Galaxy, which is likely to affect planet demographics. Our local neighbourhood is dominated by young, metal-rich stars in the galactic thin disc, while the stellar halo and…
We employ an improved methodology to insert live stellar disks into high-resolution dark matter simulations of Milky Way sized halos, allowing us to investigate the fate of thin stellar disks in the tumultuous environment of cold dark…
We develop an analytic model to calculate the rate at which galaxy disks are heated by dark matter substructures orbiting in their halos. The model takes into account the internal structure, mass function and accretion rate of satellites…
[Abridged] Over the past two decades observations and theoretical simulations have established a global frame-work of galaxy formation and evolution in the young Universe. Galaxies formed as baryonic gas cooled at the centres of collapsing…
We discuss the main ingredients necessary to build models of chemical evolution of spiral galaxies and in particular the Milky Way galaxy. These ingredients include: the star formation rate, the initial mass function, the stellar yields and…
We examine a possible formation scenario of galactic thick discs with numerical simulations. Thick discs have previously been argued to form in clumpy disc phase in the high-redshift Universe, which host giant clumps of <10^9 M_sun in their…
The possibility that the Galactic spheroid was assembled from numerous chemically-distinct, proto-Galactic fragments is investigated using a Monte-Carlo technique designed to simulate the chemical evolution of the Galaxy in hierarchical…
The advent of Gaia's 2nd data release in combination with large spectroscopic surveys are revolutionizing our understanding of the Galaxy. Thanks to these and the knowledge accumulated thus far, a more mature picture of the evolution of the…
In this study, we investigate the distribution and origin of chemical elements in different stellar components of simulated Milky Way-like galaxies in relation to their mass assembly history, stellar age, and metallicity. Using a sample of…
A new idea is proposed for the origin of bulges in spiral galaxies. Numerical simulations for the protogalactic collapse suggest strongly that galactic bulges have been assembled from massive clumps formed in the galactic disks in their…
This review discusses the structure and evolution of the Milky Way, in the context of opportunities provided by asteroseismology of red giants. The review is structured according to the main Galactic components: the thin disk, thick disk,…
Our Galaxy is a complex machine in which several processes operate simultaneously: metal-poor gas is accreted, is chemically enriched by dying stars, and then drifts inwards, surrendering its angular momentum to stars; new stars are formed…
The Galactic halo is supposed to form from merging with nearby dwarf galaxies. In order to probe different components of the Galactic halo, we have applied the Gaussian Mixture Models method to a selected sample of metal poor stars with…
We have undertaken the study of the elemental abundances and kinematic properties of a metal-poor sample of candidate thick-disk stars selected from the RAVE spectroscopic survey of bright stars to differentiate among the present scenarios…
The existence of stellar halos around galaxies is a natural prediction of the hierarchical nature of the LambdaCDM model. Recent observations of Milky Way-like galaxies have revealed a wide range in stellar halo mass, including cases with…
The empirical model of Lu et al. 2014 is updated with recent data and used to study galaxy star formation and assembly histories. At $z > 2$, the predicted galaxy stellar mass functions are steep, and a significant amount of star formation…
We outline a scenario of galaxy formation in which the gas in galaxy-forming regions was preheated to high entropy by vigorous energy feedback associated with the formation of stars in old ellipticals and bulges and with AGN activity. Such…
The Milky Way is surrounded by large amounts of gaseous matter that are slowly being accreted over cosmic timescales to support star formation in the disk. The corresponding gas-accretion rate represents a key parameter for the past,…
We analyze an adaptive mesh refinement hydrodynamic cosmological simulation of a Milky Way-sized galaxy to study the cold gas in the halo. HI observations of the Milky Way and other nearby spirals have revealed the presence of such gas in…
Galactic halo gas traces inflowing star formation fuel and feedback from a galaxy's disk and is therefore crucial to our understanding of galaxy evolution. In this review, we summarize the multi-wavelength observational properties and…