Milky Way simulations: the Galaxy, its stellar halo and its satellites - insights from a hybrid cosmological approach

Abstract

Our 'home galaxy' - the Milky Way - is a fairly large spiral galaxy, prototype of the most common morphological class in the local Universe. Although being only a galaxy, it is the only one that can be studied in unique detail: for the MilkyWay and for a number of members of the Local Group, a wealth of observational data is available about the ages and chemical abundances of their stars. Much more information is expected to come in the next few years, from ongoing and planned spectroscopic and astrometric surveys, providing a unique benchmark for modern theories of galaxy formation. In this review, I will summarize recent results on the formation of our Milky Way, its stellar halo, and its satellite galaxies. I will focus, in particular, on results obtained in the framework of hybrid models of galaxy formation, and refer to other reviews in this issue for studies based on hydrodynamical simulations.

10 pages, 10 figures, invited plenary review at the Astronomische Gesellschaft meeting (Heidelberg 2011), to appear in Reviews in Modern Astronomy Vol.24 - typos corrected

References in corpus (12)

• The hierarchical formation of the brightest cluster galaxies
• Too big to fail? The puzzling darkness of massive Milky Way subhaloes
• A Semi-Analytic Model for the Co-evolution of Galaxies, Black Holes, and Active Galactic Nuclei
• Two Stellar Components in the Halo of the Milky Way
• Massloss of galaxies due to a UV-background
• A common mass scale for satellite galaxies of the Milky Way
• The accretion origin of the Milky Way's stellar halo
• The stellar halo of the Galaxy
• The MORGANA model for the rise of galaxies and active nuclei
• The Galaxy and its stellar halo: insights on their formation from a hybrid cosmological approach
• Central mass and luminosity of Milky Way satellites in the LCDM model
• On the common mass scale of the Milky Way satellites

Cited by in corpus (7)

• The Galaxy in Context: Structural, Kinematic and Integrated Properties
• Disentangling the Galactic Halo with APOGEE: II. Chemical and Star Formation Histories for the Two Distinct Populations
• Accretion of Galaxy Groups into Galaxy Clusters
• The kinematics of globular cluster populations in the E-MOSAICS simulations and their implications for the assembly history of the Milky Way
• Modelling the chemical evolution of the Galaxy halo
• New Signatures of the Milky Way Formation in the Local Halo and Inner Halo Streamers in the Era of Gaia
• The Isophotal Structure of Star-forming Galaxies at $0.5<z<1.8$ in CANDELS: Implications for the Evolution of Galaxy Structure