Found 20 talks width keyword Galactic evolution

Time-domain space missions have revolutionized our understanding of stellar physics and stellar populations. Virtually all evolved stars can be detected as oscillators in missions such as Kepler, K2, TESS and PLATO.  Asteroseismology, or the study of stellar oscillations, can be combined with spectroscopy to infer masses, radii and ages for very large samples of stars.  This asteroseismic data can also be used to train machine learning tools to infer ages for even larger stellar population studies, sampling a large fraction of the volume of the Milky Way galaxy. In this talk I demonstrate that asteroseismic radii are in excellent agreement with those inferred using Gaia and spectroscopic data; this demonstrates that the current asteroseismic data is precise and accurate at the 1-2% level.  Major new catalogs for Kepler and K2 data are nearing completion, and I present initial results from both. We find unexpected age patterns in stars though to be chemically old, illustrating the power of age information for Galactic archeology.  Prospects for future progress in the TESS era will also be discussed.

In this talk I present an overview of the structure, activity and goals
of the Gaia-ESO survey, a large public spectroscopic survey aimed at investigating
the origin and formation history of our Galaxy by collecting high quality spectroscopy
of representative samples (about 105 Milky Way stars) of all Galactic stellar populations,
in the field and in clusters. Briefly, I discuss the most relevant results obtained so far.
In particular, I present our study on the internal kinematics of Galactic globular clusters based on the radial estimates obtained from the survey complemented with ESO archive data.

Gaia - the ESA cornerstone astrometric mission - was launched in December 2013, with the goal of censing the Milky Way population in a 6D space (positions and velocity) of 10^9 point-like obects, with errors
100-1000 times smaller than Hipparcos, with three color magnitudes and spectra as well. The scientific impact of its data will be large in many fields of astrophysics, from Galactic science, to Solar system objects, to stellar astrophysics, to galaxies and Quasars; from the distance ladder revision to fundamental physics. I will describe the mission concept, the scientific goals, and the present status of the mission, with special attention to the flux calibration of Gaia data.

Galaxies in different environments have different properties. In dense environments galaxies are more likely to be red, passive ellipticals than in less dense environments. This difference can be detected both on small and large-scale environments. In this talk, I will present results on galaxy populations in different environments on two scales: the group scale and the supercluster scale. The goal of our project is to find out if there are differences between massive galaxies in similar groups, but different large-scale environments. The results will tell if the evolution of galaxies is fully determined by the mass of their dark matter halo, or if the large-scale environment also play a role. 

How do the first galaxies form and evolve? Optical and near-infrared deep surveys are now finding galaxies at very high redshifts. However, they are typically small, not massive and present some but not very high star formation. But now the Herschel Multi-tiered Extragalactic Survey (HerMES), the largest project that has being carried out with the Herschel Space Observatory, in collaboration with other groups, has discovered a massive, maximum-starburst galaxy at a redshift of 6.34. The presence of galaxies like HFLS3 in the early Universe challenges current theories of galaxy fomation and evolution. I will describe the method we have developed to find these galaxies, the follow-up observations with different facilities and the main physical properties of this extreme object.

In the last few years there has been cumulative evidence showing that massive galaxies have dramatically grown in size since z~3. This result has remained very controversial as it seems at odd with our previous knowledge based on the detailed analysis of the stellar populations of nearby massive spheroids which shows that their stars were form very early on and over a short time interval. In addition to this, there is growing observational support for a significant evolution of the morphologies of these galaxies with cosmic time. In this talk, I will summarize what we have learned since the discovery of the strong evolution of the morphological properties of the massive galaxies, the mechanisms proposed to explain their origin and size increase, and the pending questions still to solve.

It has been thirty years since the seminal work of Alan Dressler on the density-morphology relation, which established environment as a driving mechanism for galaxy formation and evolution. In the following three decades, we have learned that both the intrinsic processes (nature) and environment (nurture) contribute towards shaping the galaxy populations, and the connection between these two still remains an open question. I will summarize recent results on the interplay between environment and galaxy evolution, obtained from the SDSS DR4 galaxy groups catalogue (Yang et al. 2007) by comparing the properties of central and satellite galaxies as a function of their stellar mass and the dark matter mass of their
host halos.

I will review the status of our understanding of galaxy formation in the prevailing cold dark matter paradigm. After reviewing the successes and failures of the most natural predictions of this scenario I will focus on the consequences of two of its main predictions: the presence of large numbers of low-mass dark matter halos and the prevalence of accretion events during the formation of normal galaxies. In particular, I will discuss the interpretation of the recent discovery of a population of ultra-faint galaxies in the Local Group, and its relation to the profuse cold dark matter substructure expected in the Galactic halo. I will also discuss the importance that accretion events might have had in shaping not only the stellar halo but also the disk component(s) of the Milky Way.

Based on observations with the Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS), I will present accurate relative ages for a sample of 64 Galactic globular clusters. This Hubble Space Telescope (HST) Treasury program has been designed to provide a new large, deep and homogeneous photometric database. Relative ages have been obtained using a main sequence fitting procedure between clusters in the sample. Relative ages are determined with an accuracy from 2% to 7%. It has been proved that derived ages are independent of the assumed theoretical models. The existence of two well defined Galactic globular cluster groups is found. A group of old globular clusters with an age dispersion of 6% and showing no age-metallicity relation, and, on the other hand, a younger group showing a clear age-metallicity relation similar to that found in the globular clusters associated to the Sagittarius dwarf galaxy. Roughly 1/3 of the clusters belong to the younger group. Considering these new results, it is very tempting to suggest a Milky Way's halo formation scenario in which two differentiated phases took place. A very fast collapse, where the old and coeval globular clusters where formed, followed by accretions of Milky Way's satellite galaxies.