Related papers: Weighing the Milky Way
The star formation rate history of the Milky Way is derived using the chromospheric age distribution for 552 stars in the solar neighborhood. The stars sample birthsites distributed over a very large range of distances because of orbital…
The outer parts of the Milky Way's disc are significantly out of equilibrium. Using only distances and proper motions of stars from Gaia's Early Data Release 3, in the range |b|<10{\deg}, 130{\deg}<l<230{\deg}, we show that for stars in the…
Our Milky Way Galaxy is a typical large spiral galaxy, representative of the most common morphological type in the local Universe. We can determine the properties of individual stars in unusual detail, and use the characteristics of the…
Cosmic magnetic fields are an integral component of the interstellar medium (ISM), having influence on scales ranging from star formation to galactic dynamics. While observations of external galaxies offer a `birds-eye-view' of magnetic…
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…
We model the phase-space of the kinematic tracers using general, smooth distribution functions to derive a conservative lower bound on the total mass within 150-200 kpc. By approximating the potential as Keplerian, the phase-space…
The number and properties of observed gravitational microlensing events depend on the distribution and kinematics of stars and other compact objects along the line of sight. In particular, precise measurements of the microlensing optical…
In chemodynamical evolution models it is usually assumed that the Milky Way galaxy forms from the inside-out implying that gas inflows onto the disk decrease with galactocentric distance. Similarly, to reproduce differences between chemical…
We use the timescale distribution of ~3000 microlensing events measured by the OGLE-III survey, together with accurate new made-to-measure dynamical models of the Galactic bulge/bar region, to measure the IMF in the inner Milky Way. The…
Mira variables are useful distance indicators, due to their high luminosities and well-defined period-luminosity relation. We select 1863 Miras from SAAO and MACHO observations to examine their use as distance estimators in the Milky Way.…
Two disks of young stars have recently been discovered in the Galactic Center. The disks are rotating in the gravitational field of the central black hole at radii r=0.1-0.3 pc and thus open a new opportunity to measure the central mass. We…
The presence of dark matter in the Universe is nowadays widely supported by a large body of astronomical and cosmological observations. The central region of the Milky Way is expected to harbor a large amount of dark matter.…
Astronomers have been using the measured luminosity to estimate the {\em luminous mass} of stars, based on empirically established mass-to-light ratio which seems to be only applicable to a special class of stars---the main-sequence…
An expression for rotational velocity of a test particle around the central mass in the invariant plane is derived. For this, a line element of Schwarzschild de-Sitter space-time is used to study the effect of cosmological constant…
The Milky Way is a spiral galaxy with the Schechter characteristic luminosity $L_*$, thus an important anchor point of the Hubble sequence of all spiral galaxies. Yet the true appearance of the Milky Way has remained elusive for centuries.…
A novel class of vacuum metrics expressible in analytical form was recently found for pure $\mathcal R^2$ gravity, based on a groundwork put forth by Buchdahl in 1962. These Buchdahl-inspired solutions offer a practical framework for…
We use a hybrid approach that combines high-resolution simulations of the formation of a Milky Way-like halo with a semi-analytic model of galaxy formation to study the mass content of dwarf galaxies in the concordance $\Lambda$CDM…
We investigate the kinematics of stars in the mid-plane of the Milky Way on scales between 25 pc and 10 kpc with data from the Apache Point Observatory Galactic Evolution Experiment (APOGEE), the Radial Velocity Experiment (RAVE), and the…
We propose a quantum experiment to measure with high precision the Schwarzschild space-time parameters of the Earth. The scheme can also be applied to measure distances by taking into account the curvature of the Earth's space-time. As a…
A long-standing problem in astrophysics is to measure the mass associated with galaxies. Gravitational lensing provides one of the cleanest ways to make this measurement. To date, the most powerful lensing probes of galactic mass have been…