• Journal of The Korean Astronomical Society
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• v.29 no.spc1
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• pp.111-118
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• 1996

We review observational evidence bearing on the formation of a prototypical large spiral galaxy, the Milky Way. New ground- and space-based studies of globular star clusters and dwarf spheroidal galaxies provide a wealth of information to constrain theories of galaxy formation. It appears likely that the Milky Way formed by an combination of rapid, dissipative collapse and mergers, but the relative contributions of these two mechanisms remain controversial. New evidence, however, indicates that initial star and star cluster formation occurred simultaneously over a volume that presently extends to twice the distance of the Magellanic Clouds.

• Publications of The Korean Astronomical Society
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• v.30 no.2
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• pp.183-187
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• 2015

We use ALLWISE data release W1- and W2-band epoch photometry collected by the Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) to determine slopes of the period-luminosity relations for RR Lyrae stars in 15 globular clusters in the corresponding bands. We further combine these results with V- and K-band photometry of Galactic field RR Lyrae stars to determine the metallicity slopes of the log $P_F-[Fe/H]-M_K$, log $P_F-[Fe/H]-M_{W1}$, and log $P_F-[Fe/H]-M_{W2}$ period-metallicity-luminosity relations. We infer the zero points of these relations and determine the kinematical parameters of thick-disk and halo RR Lyraes via statistical parallax, and estimate the RR Lyrae-based distances to 18 Local-Group galaxies including the center of the Milky Way.

• The Bulletin of The Korean Astronomical Society
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• v.45 no.1
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• pp.31.3-32
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• 2020

The surface brightness fluctuation (SBF) is one of the most crucial distance indicators for unresolved stellar systems at large distances. Here, we present an evolutionary population synthesis model of the surface brightness fluctuation (SBF) for normal and He-enriched simple stellar populations (SSPs). Our SBF model for the normal-He population agrees well with other existing models, but the He-rich populations bring about a substantial change in the SBF of SSPs. Our normal-He SBF model well reproduces the observed SBFs of the Milky Way globular clusters, but the SBFs of early-type galaxies in the Virgo Cluster are placed between the normal-He and He-rich SBF models. We show that the SBF-based distance estimation would be affected by up to a 10-20% level in I- and near-IR bands at given colors. Finally, we propose that when combined with independent metallicity and age indicators such as Mg2 and H��, the UV and optical SBFs can readily detect underlying He-rich populations in unresolved stellar systems. Given the degree of the SBF variation resulting from the population difference, we suggest that the distance measurement before the proper in-depth analysis of stellar populations should be done with great caution.

• The Bulletin of The Korean Astronomical Society
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• v.41 no.1
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• pp.39.4-40
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• 2016

We aim to investigate formation of satellite sub-galactic structures around isolated dwarf galaxies using cosmological hydrodynamic zoom simulations. For this, we modify a cosmological hydrodynamic code, GADGET-3, in a way that includes gas cooling down to T~10K, gas heating by universal reionization when z < 8.9, UV shielding for high density regions of $n_{shield}$ > $0.014cm^{-3}$, star formation in the dense regions ($n_H$ > $100cm^{-3}$), and supernova feedback. To get good statistics, we perform three different simulations for different target galaxies of the same mass of ${\sim}10^{10}M_{sun}$. Each simulation starts in a cubic box of a side length of 1Mpc/h with 17 million particles from z = 49. The mass of dark matter (DM) and gas particle is $M_{DM}=4.1{\times}10^3M_{sun}$ and $M_{gas}=7.9{\times}10^2M_{sun}$, respectively, thus each satellite sub-galactic structure can be resolved with more than hundreds or thousands particles. We analyze total 90 sub-galactic structures that have formed outside of the main halos but infall the main halos. We found that 1) mini halos that interact more with the other mini halos tend to accrete the more mass, 2) mini halos that interact more before the reionization tend to form more stars, 3) mini halos with the more interaction tend to approach closer to the galactic center and have the lower orbital circularity, 4) survivals even in the strong tidal fields evolve baryon dominated system, such as globular clusters.

• Journal of The Korean Astronomical Society
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• v.56 no.1
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• pp.59-73
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• 2023

The second generation of stars in the globular clusters (GCs) of the Milky Way (MW) exhibit unusually high N, Na, or Al, compared to typical Galactic halo stars at similar metallicities. The halo field stars enhanced with such elements are believed to have originated in disrupted GCs or escaped from existing GCs. We identify such stars in the metallicity range -3.0 < [Fe/H] < 0.0 from a sample of ~36,800 giant stars observed in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and Large Sky Area Multi-Object Fiber Spectroscopic Telescope survey, and present their dynamical properties. The N-rich population (NRP) and N-normal population (NNP) among our giant sample do not exhibit similarities in either in their metallicity distribution function (MDF) or dynamical properties. We find that, even though the MDF of the NRP looks similar to that of the MW's GCs in the range of [Fe/H] < -1.0, our analysis of the dynamical properties does not indicate similarities between them in the same metallicity range, implying that the escaped members from existing GCs may account for a small fraction of our N-rich stars, or the orbits of the present GCs have been altered by the dynamical friction of the MW. We also find a significant increase in the fraction of N-rich stars in the halo field in the very metal-poor (VMP; [Fe/H] < -2.0) regime, comprising up to ~20% of the fraction of the N-rich stars below [Fe/H] = -2.5, hinting that partially or fully destroyed VMP GCs may have in some degree contributed to the Galactic halo. A more detailed dynamical analysis of the NRP reveals that our sample of N-rich stars do not share a single common origin. Although a substantial fraction of the N-rich stars seem to originate from the GCs formed in situ, more than 60% of them are not associated with those of typical Galactic populations, but probably have extragalactic origins associated with Gaia Sausage/Enceladus, Sequoia, and Sagittarius dwarf galaxies, as well as with presently unrecognized progenitors.