The Galactic Bulge: A Review

Abstract

The Milky Way is the only galaxy for which we can resolve individual stars at all evolutionary phases, from the Galactic center to the outskirt. The last decade, thanks to the advent of near IR detectors and 8 meter class telescopes, has seen a great progress in the understanding of the Milky Way central region: the bulge. Here we review the most recent results regarding the bulge structure, age, kinematics and chemical composition. These results have profound implications for the formation and evolution of the Milky Way and of galaxies in general. This paper provides a summary on our current understanding of the Milky Way bulge, intended mainly for workers on other fields.

10 pages, 8 Postscript figures, uses iaus.cls To appear in Proceedings of IAU Symp. 245 on "Formation and Evolution of Galaxy Bulges", (held at Oxford, July 16-20 2007), Eds. Martin Bureau, Lia Athanassoula, and Beatriz Barbuy

References in corpus (34)

• Secular Evolution and the Formation of Pseudobulges in Disk Galaxies
• Age and Metallicity Distribution of the Galactic Bulge from Extensive Optical and Near-IR Stellar Photometry
• The properties of Galactic globular cluster sub-systems
• Oxygen, Sodium, Magnesium and Aluminium as tracers of the Galactic Bulge Formation
• Color-Magnitude Diagram Distribution of the Bulge Red Clump Stars - Evidence for the Galactic Bar
• Abundances of Baade's Window Giants from Keck/HIRES Spectra: I. Stellar Parameters and [Fe/H] Values
• Oxygen abundances in the Galactic Bulge: evidence for fast chemical enrichment
• Globular cluster system and Milky Way properties revisited
• The Initial Mass Function of the Galactic Bulge Down to ~0.15 Msun
• A Self-Consistent Dynamical Model for the COBE Detected Galactic Bar
• Modelling the Galactic bar using OGLE-II Red Clump Giant Stars
• Transiting extrasolar planetary candidates in the Galactic bulge
• HST/WFPC2 proper motions in two bulge fields: kinematics and stellar population of the Galactic bulge
• Kinematics of the Galactic Globular Cluster System: New Radial Velocities for Clusters in the Direction of the Inner Galaxy
• The First Detailed Abundances for M giants in Baade's Window from Infrared Spectroscopy
• Infrared stellar populations in the central parts of the Milky Way galaxy
• The Bulge Radial Velocity Assay (BRAVA): I. Techniques and a Rotation Curve
• The Long Bar in the Milky Way. Corroboration of an old hypothesis
• K Giants in Baade's Window. II. The Abundance Distribution
• Microlensing Optical Depth towards the Galactic Bulge Using Clump Giants from the MACHO Survey
• Chemical Evolution of the Galactic Bulge as Derived from High-Resolution Infrared Spectroscopy of K and M Red Giants
• Galactic Bulge Microlensing Optical Depth from EROS-2
• The Outer Regions of the Galactic Bulge:II Analysis
• Microlensing optical depth toward the Galactic Bulge using bright sources from OGLE-II
• Metallicity of Red Giants in the Galactic Bulge from Near-Infrared Spectroscopy
• An Upper Limit to the Age of the Galactic Bar
• Field Stars and Clusters of the Galactic Bulge: Implications for Galaxy Formation
• Evidence of a Metal Rich Galactic Bar from the Vertex Deviation of the Velocity Ellipsoid
• Proper Motion Dispersions of Red Clump Giants in the Galactic Bulge: Observations and Model Comparisons
• Dynamics of the Galactic Bulge using Planetary Nebulae
• Catalog of fundamental mode RR Lyrae stars in the Galactic bulge from the Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment
• K Giants in Baade's Window. I. Velocity and Line-strength Measurements
• The effects of Population III stars and variable IMF on the chemical evolution of the Galaxy
• Mass Distribution and Bulge Formation in the Milky Way Galaxy

Cited by in corpus (8)

• Chemical evolution of the Galactic bulge as traced by microlensed dwarf and subgiant stars. II. Ages, metallicities, detailed elemental abundances, and connections to the Galactic thick disc
• Abundances in bulge stars from high-resolution, near-IR spectra I. The CNO elements observed during the science verification of CRIRES at VLT
• Elemental Abundances in the X-Ray Gas of Early-Type Galaxies with XMM and Chandra Observations
• The Milky Way Bulge: Observed properties and a comparison to external galaxies
• Disk evaporation in a planetary nebula
• Theoretical Models of the Galactic Bulge
• Astrometry with the Wide-Field InfraRed Space Telescope
• Reliable stellar abundances of individual stars with the MUSE integral-field spectrograph