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Outer Regions of the Milky Way

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Outskirts of Galaxies

Part of the book series: Astrophysics and Space Science Library ((ASSL,volume 434))

Abstract

With the start of the Gaia era, the time has come to address the major challenge of deriving the star formation history and evolution of the disk of our Milky Way. Here we review our present knowledge of the outer regions of the Milky Way disk population. Its stellar content, its structure and its dynamical and chemical evolution are summarized, focussing on our lack of understanding both from an observational and a theoretical viewpoint. We describe the unprecedented data that Gaia and the upcoming ground-based spectroscopic surveys will provide in the next decade. More in detail, we quantify the expected accuracy in position, velocity and astrophysical parameters of some of the key tracers of the stellar populations in the outer Galactic disk. Some insights on the future capability of these surveys to answer crucial and fundamental issues are discussed, such as the mechanisms driving the spiral arms and the warp formation. Our Galaxy, the Milky Way, is our cosmological laboratory for understanding the process of formation and evolution of disk galaxies. What we learn in the next decades will be naturally transferred to the extragalactic domain.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Following the Schönrich and Binney (2009) terminology, churning implies a change of guiding-centre radii, while blurring means a steady increase of the oscillation amplitude around the guiding centre.

  2. 2.

    See http://www.ing.iac.es/confluence/display/WEAV/The+WEAVE+Project.

  3. 3.

    Gaia Science Performance web page: http://www.cosmos.esa.int/web/gaia/science-performance.

  4. 4.

    Gaia Archive web page: http://gaia.esac.esa.int/archive/.

  5. 5.

    The code was released at the 2nd Gaia challenge workshop and is publicly available at https://github.com/mromerog/Gaia-errors.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the MICINN (Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation)-FEDER through grant AYA2012-39551-C02-01 and ESP2013-48318-C2-1-R and by the European Community’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) under grant agreement GENIUS, FP7-606740. I thank my colleagues at the University of Barcelona and specially Mercè Romero-Gómez, Teresa Antoja, Maria Monguió, Santi Roca-Fàbrega and Roger Mor for our common research activities in this exciting Gaia Era.

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  1. Institute of Cosmos Science (IEEC-UB), University of Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain

    Francesca Figueras

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  1. Inst de Astrofísica de Canarias, San Cristobal de la Laguna, Spain

    Johan H. Knapen

  2. Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore, USA

    Janice C. Lee

  3. Dept. Astrofisica, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Madrid, Spain

    Armando Gil de Paz

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Figueras, F. (2017). Outer Regions of the Milky Way. In: Knapen, J., Lee, J., Gil de Paz, A. (eds) Outskirts of Galaxies. Astrophysics and Space Science Library, vol 434. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-56570-5_1

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