Related papers: Measuring Outer Disk Warps with Optical Spectrosco…
Recent imaging of protoplanetary disks with high resolution and contrast have revealed a striking variety of substructure. Of particular interest are cases where near-infrared scattered light images show evidence for low-intensity annular…
The outer disks of galaxies present a unique laboratory for studying the process of disk formation. A considerable fraction of observed disks exhibit a break in their surface brightness profiles. The ubiquity of these features points to a…
Recent observations of several protoplanetary discs have found evidence of departures from flat, circular motion in the inner regions of the disc. One possible explanation for these observations is a disc warp, which could be induced by a…
This chapter reviews theoretical work on the stellar dynamics of galaxy disks. All the known collective global instabilities are identified, and their mechanisms described in terms of local wave mechanics. A detailed discussion of warps and…
Multi-wavelength spectroscopy can be used to constrain the dust and gas properties in debris disks. Circumstellar dust absorbs and scatters incident stellar light. The scattered light is sometimes resolved spatially at visual and…
The outer regions of disk galaxies show a drop-off in optical and Halpha emission, suggesting a star formation threshold radius, assumed to owe to a critical surface density below which star formation does not take place. Signs of…
After their initial formation, disk galaxies are observed to be rotationally stable over periods of >6 Gyr, implying that any large velocity disturbances of stars and gas clouds are damped rapidly on the timescale of their rotation.…
We present a kinematic study of the outer regions (R_25<R<2 R_25) of 17 edge-on disk galaxies. Using deep long-slit spectroscopy (flux sensitivity a few 10^-19 erg s^-1 cm^-2 arcsec^-2), we search for H-alpha emission, which must be emitted…
The interstellar thick disks of galaxies contain not only gas, but significant quantities of dust. Most of our knowledge of extraplanar dust in disk galaxies comes from direct broadband optical imaging of these systems, wherein the dust is…
We present kinematic measurements of thin and thick disk components in a sample of nine edge-on galaxies. We extract stellar and ionized gas rotation curves at and above the galaxies' midplanes using the Ca II triplet absorption features…
The outskirts of galaxies offer extreme environments where we can test our understanding of the formation, evolution, and destruction of molecules and their relationship with star formation and galaxy evolution. We review the basic…
Warped structures are often observed in disk galaxies, yet their physical origin is still under investigation. We present a systematic study of warped edge-on disk galaxies based on imaging data from the DESI Legacy Imaging Surveys DR8,…
We identify a new dust instability that occurs in warped discs. The instability is caused by the oscillatory gas motions induced by the warp in the bending wave regime. We first demonstrate the instability using a local 1D (vertical) toy…
Star formation in galaxies is triggered by a combination of processes, including gravitational instabilities, spiral wave shocks, stellar compression, and turbulence compression. Some of these persist in the far outer regions where the…
Warps are observed in a large fraction of disc galaxies, and can be due to a large number of different processes. Some of these processes might also cause vertical heating and flaring. Using a sample of galaxies simulated in their…
The nature and origin of the Galactic warp represent one of the open questions posed by Galactic evolution. Thanks to Gaia high precision absolute astrometry, steps towards the understanding of the warp's dynamical nature can be made.…
The presence of radial truncations in stellar disks is reviewed. There is ample evidence that many disk galaxies have relatively shaprt truncations in their disks. These often are symmetric and independent of the wavelength band of the…
In recent years an increasing number of observational studies have hinted at the presence of warps in protoplanetary discs, however a general comprehensive description of observational diagnostics of warped discs was missing. We performed a…
Circumstellar asymmetries such as central warps have recently been shown to cast shadows on outer disks. We investigate the hydrodynamical consequences of such variable illumination on the outer regions of a transition disk, and the…
Ionized gas and stellar kinematics have been measured along the major axes of seventeen nearby spiral galaxies of intermediate to late morphological type. We discuss the properties of each sample galaxy distinguishing between those…