English

Disk heating agents across the Hubble sequence

Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics 2015-06-04 v1

Abstract

We measure the shape of the velocity ellipsoid in two late-type spiral galaxies (Hubble types Sc and Scd) and combine these results with our previous analyses of six early-type spirals (Sa to Sbc) to probe the relation between galaxy morphology and the ratio of the vertical and radial dispersions. We confirm at much higher significance (99.9 percent) our prior detection of a tight correlation between these quantities. We explore the trends of the magnitude and shape of the velocity ellipsoid axes with galaxy properties (colour, gas surface mass density, and spiral arm structure). The observed relationships allow for an observational identification of the radial and vertical disk heating agents in external disk galaxies.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1204.3430,
  title  = {Disk heating agents across the Hubble sequence},
  author = {J. Gerssen and K. Shapiro Griffin},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1204.3430},
  year   = {2015}
}

Comments

11 pages, 8 figures, 4 tables. Accepted for publication in MNRAS

R2 v1 2026-06-21T20:49:58.293Z