Related papers: First Description of Discrete Stars Composing the …
The gas accretion and star-formation histories of galaxies like the Milky Way remain an outstanding problem in astrophysics. Observations show that 8 billion years ago, the progenitors to Milky Way-mass galaxies were forming stars 30 times…
The history of astrometry, the branch of astronomy dealing with the positions of celestial objects, is a lengthy and complex chronicle, having its origins in the earliest records of astronomical observations more than two thousand years…
HI observations in the 21cm line have been a principal tool for investigating the large-scale structure of the Milky Way. This review considers what was learned in the first decade after the discovery of the 21cm line, and how that…
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…
Galactic warps represent an old unresolved problem, since the discovery, at the end of the fifties, of the HI warp of the Milky Way. In this paper, we propose a new scenario explaining a large fraction of the observed optical warps. Based…
White dwarf stars are the most common final stage of stellar evolution. Since the serendipitous discovery of the first white dwarf by William Herschel and the first physical models by Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar and Arthur Eddington, there…
How the Milky Way has accumulated its mass over the Hubble time, whether significant amounts of gas and stars were accreted from satellite galaxies, or whether the Milky Way has experienced an initial gas assembly and then evolved…
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…
The Milky Way Galaxy contains a large, spherical component which is believed to harbor a substantial amount of unseen matter. Recent observations indirectly suggest that as much as half of this ``dark matter'' may be in the form of old,…
We review the progress made in understanding molecular cloud formation and evolution toward star formation since the first Crete conference in 1990. It now seems clear that molecular clouds in the Galaxy at least form from compressed HI…
``One could imagine that as a result of enormously extended astronomical experience, the entire universe consists of countless identical copies of our Milky Way, that the infinite space can be partitioned into cubes each containing an…
Our understanding of the Milky Way disk is rapidly improving with the recent advent of the high quality and vast amount of observational data. We summarize our current view of the structure of the Milky Way disk, such as the masses and…
In the era of large-scale spectroscopic surveys in the Local Group (LG), we can explore using chemical abundances of halo stars to study the star formation and chemical enrichment histories of the dwarf galaxy progenitors of the Milky Way…
We present initial results from a population synthesis model aimed at determining the star formation rate of the Milky-Way. We find that a total star formation rate of 0.68 to 1.45 Msun/yr is able to reproduce the observed number of young…
The idea of dwarf and giants stars, but not the nomenclature, was first established by Eijnar Hertzsprung in 1905; his first diagrams in support appeared in 1911. In 1913 Henry Norris Russell could demonstrate the effect far more strikingly…
Ancient, long-lived stars remain present in all components of our home galaxy, the Milky Way. Born a few hundred million after the Big Bang and during a time that marked the very beginning of the chemical evolution, these stars display very…
As the European maritime powers expanded their reach beyond north Atlantic coastal waters to distant lands as far away as the East Indies, access to a practical means of maritime navigation in the southern hemisphere became imperative. The…
The prevailing model of galaxy formation proposes that galaxies like the Milky Way are built through a series of mergers with smaller galaxies over time. However, the exact details of the Milky Way's assembly history remain uncertain. In…
I selectively review the various dynamical scenarios that have been explored to date, especially those that illustrate the conundrums. In short, although the existence of asymmetries are convincing enough, the interpretation remains…
Observations of the stellar content of the Milky Way's bulge helps to understand the stellar content and evolution of distant galaxies. In this brief overview I will first highlight some recent work directed towards measuring the history of…