Related papers: Dynamical Blueprints for Galaxies
The warps in many spiral galaxies are now known to asymmetric. Recent sensitive observations have revealed that asymmetry of warps may be the norm rather than exception. However there exists no generic mechanism to generate these…
Inverting the stellar statistics equation from 2MASS star counts, we obtain the 3D density distribution of the Galactic bulge as well as its luminosity function in the K-band. This results in a boxy bulge with axial ratios 1:0.5:0.4 and a…
The Galactic halo is supposed to form from merging with nearby dwarf galaxies. In order to probe different components of the Galactic halo, we have applied the Gaussian Mixture Models method to a selected sample of metal poor stars with…
Spiral galaxies have most of their stellar mass in a large rotating disk, and only a modest fraction in a central spheroidal bulge. This poses a major challenge for cosmological models of galaxy formation. Galaxies form at the centre of…
I review the arguments for the importance of halo structure in driving galaxy evolution and coupling a galaxy to its environment. We begin with a general discussion of the key dynamics and examples of structure dominated by modes. We find…
The atomic hydrogen gas (HI) disk in the outer region (beyond ~10 kpc from the centre) of Milky Way can provide valuable information about the structure of the dark matter halo. The recent 3-D thickness map of the outer HI disk from the all…
The stellar populations in the inner kiloparsecs of the Milky Way (MW) show complex kinematical and chemical structures. The origin and evolution of these structures is still under debate. Here we study the central region of a fully…
The standard picture of galaxy formation motivates the decomposition of the Milky Way into 3--4 stellar populations with distinct kinematic and elemental abundance distributions: the thin disk, thick disk, bulge, and stellar halo. To test…
We analyze the first cosmological simulations that recover the fragmentation of high-redshift galactic discs driven by cold streams. The fragmentation is recovered owing to an AMR resolution better than 70 pc with cooling below 10^4 K. We…
We analyze the first-year MACHO collaboration observations of microlensing towards the Galactic center using a new direct likelihood technique that is sensitive to the distribution of the events on the sky. We consider the full set of 41…
From a diameter-limited sample of 86 `face-on' spiral galaxies, the bulge-to-disk size and luminosity ratios, and other quantitative measurements for the prominence of the bulge are derived. The bulge and disk parameters have been estimated…
We present axisymmetric, orbit superposition models for 12 galaxies using data taken with the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) and ground-based observatories. In each galaxy, we detect a central black hole (BH) and measure its mass to…
We derive new constraints on the mass of the Milky Way's dark matter halo, based on a set of halo stars from SDSS as kinematic tracers. Our sample comprises 2401 rigorously selected Blue Horizontal-Branch (BHB) halo stars drawn from SDSS…
We investigate the angular momentum evolution of four disk galaxies residing in Milky Way-sized halos formed in cosmological zoom-in simulations with various sub-grid physics and merging histories. We decompose these galaxies kinematically…
Bars and spiral arms have played an important role as constraints on the dynamics and on the distribution of dark matter in the optical parts of disk galaxies. Dynamics linked to the dissipative nature of gas, and its transformation into…
Major-axis long-slit stellar kinematics was obtained for 30 edge-on spiral galaxies, 24 with a boxy/peanut-shaped (B/PS) bulge. B/PS bulges are present in >45% of highly inclined systems and much work suggests that they are the edge-on…
We study the regular or chaotic nature of motion in a disk galaxy with a dense nucleus and an asymmetric dark halo. Two cases, the 2D model and the 3D model, are investigated. In the 2D model, a considerable fraction of the phase plane is…
Recent observations have shown that most of the warps in the disk galaxies are asymmetric. However there exists no generic mechanism to generate these asymmetries in warps. We have shown that a rich variety of possible asymmetries in the…
Dwarf spheroidal galaxies (dSphs) are prime laboratories for studying dark matter (DM) and the black hole demographics in the low-mass regime. These systems are also often flattened; nevertheless most studies rely on spherical models,…
TreeSPH simulations of galaxy formation in a LCDM cosmology, with star formation, energetic stellar feedback and a meta-galactic UV field have been performed, resulting in realistic disk, S0 and E galaxies at z=0. The disk galaxies are…