相关论文: From birth associations to field stars: mapping th…
We explore to which extent stars within Galactic disk open clusters resemble each other in the high-dimensional space of their photospheric element abundances, and contrast this with pairs of field stars. Our analysis is based on abundances…
Stars originate from the dense interstellar medium, which exhibits filamentary structure to scales of $\sim 1$ kpc in galaxies like our Milky Way. We explore quantitatively how much resulting large-scale correlation there is among different…
The effects of the orbital diffusion of stars and clusters on the galactic abundance gradient have been modelled. For a single generation of field stars, the results confirm previous analyses based upon the assumption of a linear gradient…
The elemental abundance distribution of stars encodes the history of the gas-phase abundance in the Milky Way. Without a large, unbiased sample of highly precise stellar ages, the exact timing and nature of this history must be inferred…
We present an analysis of the metallicity distribution functions of fields projected along the minor axis for a sample of inclined spiral galaxies in order to search for evidence of the presence of multiple stellar populations. In all…
It is challenging to reliably identify stars that were born together outside of actively star-forming regions and bound stellar systems. However, co-natal stars should be present throughout the Galaxy, and their demographics can shed light…
OB associations are low-density groups of young stars that are dispersing from their birth environment into the Galactic field. They are important for understanding the star formation process, early stellar evolution, the properties and…
In two papers we try to confirm that all Galactic high-mass stars are formed in a cluster environment, by excluding that O-type stars found in the Galactic field actually formed there. In de Wit et al. (2004) we presented deep K-band…
Stars rarely form in isolation. Nearly half of the stars in the Milky Way have a companion, and this fraction increases in star-forming regions. However, why some dense cores and filaments form bound pairs while others form single stars…
We studied the relationship between the average stellar abundance of several elements and the orbital evolution of stars in the neighbourhood of the Sun, using both observational data for 325 late-type dwarfs in a volume-complete sample and…
Large spectroscopic surveys of the Milky Way have revealed that a small population of stars in the halo have light element abundances comparable to those found in globular clusters. The favoured explanation for the peculiar abundances of…
Stellar abundances and ages afford the means to link chemical enrichment to galactic formation. In the Milky Way, individual element abundances show tight correlations with age, which vary in slope across ([Fe/H]-[$\alpha$/Fe]). Here, we…
The orbit distribution of young stars in the Galactic disk is highly structured, from well-defined clusters to streams of stars that may be widely dispersed across the sky, but are compact in orbital action-angle space. The age distribution…
Historically, it has often been asserted that most stars form in compact clusters. In this scenario, present-day gravitationally-unbound OB associations are the result of the expansion of initially gravitationally-bound star clusters.…
To understand the formation and evolution of the Milky Way disk, we must connect its current properties to its past. We explore hydrodynamical cosmological simulations to investigate how the chemical abundances of stars might be linked to…
We continue our series of papers on phase-space distributions of stars in the Milky Way based on photometrically derived metallicities and Gaia astrometry, with a focus on the halo-disk interface in the local volume. To exploit various…
We combine star-formation histories derived from observations of high redshift galaxies with measurements of the z~0 relation between gas-phase metallicity, stellar mass, and star formation rate to make an explicit and completely empirical…
We study the distribution of orbital eccentricities of stars in thick disks generated by the heating of a pre-existing thin stellar disk through a minor merger (mass ratio 1:10), using N-body/SPH numerical simulations of interactions that…
It appears that most stars are born in clusters, and that at birth most stars have circumstellar discs which are comparable in size to the separations between the stars. Interactions between neighbouring stars and discs are therefore likely…
Stellar ages are a crucial component to studying the evolution of the Milky Way. Using Gaia DR2 distance estimates, it is now possible to estimate stellar ages for a larger volume of evolved stars through isochrone matching. This work…