ASTRON/JIVE Daily Image

© Amelia Fraser-McKelvie

For decades, astronomers have attempted to classify galaxies based on their visual appearance. Beneath these neat categories of Spiral, Lenticular and Elliptical can lie very disparate galaxies, hosting very different assembly and evolutionary histories. I will present the results of a comprehensive census of the kinematic structure of local Universe galaxies, the results of which may be a little surprising. Zooming in to ~parsec scales, we can begin to examine individual structures in local galaxies with unprecedented detail. I will discuss my favourite structures, bars and bulges, and then turn the problem on its side by introducing the GECKOS survey, an ESO/MUSE large program surveying 35 edge-on Milky Way-mass galaxies.