Journal article
The mid-life crisis of the Milky Way and M31
SJ Mutch, DJ Croton, GB Poole
Astrophysical Journal | IOP PUBLISHING LTD | Published : 2011
Abstract
Upcoming next generation galactic surveys, such as Gaia and HERMES, will deliver unprecedented detail about the structure and make-up of our Galaxy, the Milky Way, and promise to radically improve our understanding of it. However, to benefit our broader knowledge of galaxy formation and evolution we first need to quantify how typical the Galaxy is with respect to other galaxies of its type. Through modeling and comparison with a large sample of galaxies drawn from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and Galaxy Zoo, we provide tentative yet tantalizing evidence to show that both the Milky Way and nearby M31 are undergoing a critical transformation of their global properties. Both appear to possess a..
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Funding Acknowledgements
S. M. is supported by a Swinburne University SUPRA postgraduate scholarship. D. C. acknowledges receipt of a QEII Fellowship awarded by the Australian government. G. P. is supported by the ARC DP program. The authors would like to thank S. Bamford and the Galaxy Zoo team for kindly supplying the observational data used in this work. The visual classification of the Galaxy Zoo galaxies was made by more than 100,000 volunteers. Their contributions are acknowledged at http://www.galaxyzoo.org/Volunteers.aspx. The authors also thank C. Flynn, L. Spitler, and the anonymous referee for their extremely helpful comments and suggestions. The Millennium Simulation used in this paper was carried out by the Virgo Supercomputing Consortium at the Computing Centre of the Max-Planck Society. Semi-analytic galaxy catalogs from the simulation are publicly available at http://www.mpa-garching.mpg.de/millennium/.