The Populations, Structures, and Dynamics of the Milky Way and the Local Universe

Dear Colleagues,

The current standard cosmological model provides a robust framework for understanding the formation of cosmic structures through the collapse of primordial density fluctuations. While it has been remarkably successful on large scales, challenges persist on smaller scales, where the Milky Way and the Local Universe offer unique insights.

This Special Issue of the journal Astronomy, entitled “The Populations, Structures, and Dynamics of the Milky Way and the Local Universe”, leverages large-scale sky surveys and has the potential to significantly advance our understanding of the structure and formation history of the Milky Way and the Local Group. Supported by extensive surveys such as 2MASS, SDSS, RAVE, Pan-STARRS, LAMOST, APOGEE, DES, TESS, and WEAVE, as well as future missions including ELT-Mosaic, 4MOST, JUST, MUST, Mephisto, WFST, LSST, and CSST, we are entering a golden age of Galactic and Local Universe studies. These efforts promise transformative insights into the formation history and structure of our home galaxy, other Local Universe disk galaxies such as M31 and NGC 4013, and Milky Way analogs like NGC 891.

By observing multiple stellar populations in six-dimensional phase space, these surveys enable detailed investigations of the Milky Way’s dynamics through chemical tagging, time tagging, kinematics, and dynamics. The Milky Way is a highly complex dynamical system shaped by interactions with bars, spiral structures, warps, giant molecular clouds, dark matter subhalos, the Gaia–Enceladus–Sausage merger, the Sagittarius stream, the LMC, the SMC, and tidally disrupted satellite galaxies. These processes leave clear imprints on stars, producing rich population structures and galactic seismic signatures.

This Special Issue will cover progress across a broad range of topics, including bulge and disk dynamics, flares, warps, truncations, rotation curves, stellar streams, matter fields, dwarf galaxies, Milky Way-like galaxies, low-redshift galaxy physics, and HI disk galaxies.

Potential topics for contributions (reviews or new results are welcome) include the following:

(1) Milky Way population structures and galactoseismology;

(2) Disks, bulges, halos, and dwarf galaxies in the low-redshift universe;

(3) Complex disk galaxies and the nature of dark matter in the Local Universe;

(4) Numerical modeling and simulations of dwarf and disk galaxies;

(5) Time-domain stellar astronomy, stellar parameters, and machine learning applications;

(6) Other related topics.

Dr. Haifeng Wang
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

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• milky way
• local universe
• dark matter
• disk
• bulge
• halo
• kinematics
• populations
• galaxy mergers
• simulations
• modelling
• time-domain astronomy
• machine learning