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Related papers: The origin of lopsidedness in galaxies

200 papers

Large-scale asymmetries in the stellar mass distribution in galaxies are believed to trace non-equilibrium situations in the luminous and/or dark matter component. These may arise in the aftermath of events like mergers, accretion, and…

Asymmetries in the distribution of light and neutral hydrogen are often observed in spiral galaxies. Here, attention is drawn to the presence of large-scale asymmetries in their kinematics. Two examples of kinematically lopsided galaxies…

Astrophysics · Physics 2009-10-31 R. A. Swaters , R. H. M. Schoenmakers , R. Sancisi , T. S. van Albada

Warped disks are almost ubiquitous among spiral galaxies. Here we revisit and test the `fly-by scenario' of warp formation, in which impulsive encounters between galaxies are responsible for warped disks. Based on N-body simulations, we…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2015-06-22 Jeonghwan H. Kim , Sebastien Peirani , Sungsoo Kim , Hong Bae Ann , Sung-Ho An , Suk-Jin Yoon

The surface brightness distribution in the majority of stellar galactic discs falls off exponentially. Often what lies beyond such a stellar disc is the neutral hydrogen gas whose distribution also follows a nearly exponential profile at…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2015-06-22 Kanak Saha , Chanda J. Jog

We quantify the mean asymmetry of 54 face-on, early type disk galaxies (S0 to Sab) using the amplitude of the m=1 azimuthal Fourier component of the R-band surface brightness. We find that the median lopsidedness, (A_1/A_0)_{mean}, of our…

Astrophysics · Physics 2009-10-30 Gregory Rudnick , Hans-Walter Rix

We have used the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) to undertake an investigation of lopsidedness in a sample of ~25,000 nearby galaxies (z < 0.06). We use the m=1 azimuthal Fourier mode between the 50% and 90% light radii as our measure of…

Much of our effort in understanding the long-term evolution and morphology of the Milky Way and other galaxies has focused on the equilibrium of its luminous disk. However, the interplay between all components, seen and unseen, is a major…

Astrophysics · Physics 2007-05-23 Martin D. Weinberg

An $m=1$ lopsided asymmetry is common in disc galaxies. Here, we investigate the excitation of an $m=1$ lopsidedness in host galaxies during minor mergers while choosing a set of 1:10 merger models (with varying orbital configurations,…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2022-03-15 Soumavo Ghosh , Kanak Saha , Chanda J. Jog , Francoise Combes , Paola Di Matteo

We investigate the tidally-induced conversion of barred late-type spirals to Magellanic-type discs with numerical simulations, to establish how the lifetime of lopsidedness (asymmetry) varies with numerical parametrizations. Using a…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2015-06-18 Cameron Yozin , Kenji Bekki

Lopsided galaxies are late-type galaxies with a non-axisymmetric disk due to an uneven distribution of their stellar mass. Despite being a relatively common perturbation, several questions regarding its origin and the information that can…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2025-07-02 Valentina Fontirroig , Facundo A. Gomez , Marcelo Jaque Arancibia , Arianna Dolfi , Nicolas Monsalves

Most of the observed and simulated galactic bars are symmetric in the face-on view. However, there are indeed cases of bars that are off-center with respect to the disk or have an asymmetric shape. The only well-known example showing both…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2021-12-01 Ewa L. Lokas

It is shown that pure exponential discs in spiral galaxies are capable of supporting slowly varying discrete global lopsided modes, which can explain the observed features of lopsidedness in the stellar discs. Using linearized fluid…

Astrophysics · Physics 2009-11-13 K. Saha , F. Combes , C. Jog

About 30\% of disk galaxies show lopsidedness in their stellar disk. Although such a large-scale asymmetry in the disk can be primarily looked upon as a long-lived mode ($m=1$), the physical origin of the lopsidedness in the disk continues…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2026-04-08 Biju Saha , Suman Sarkar , Arunima Banerjee

It is well known that satellite galaxies are not isotropically distributed among their host galaxies as suggested by most interpretations of the $\Lambda$CDM model. One type of anisotropy recently detected in the SDSS (and seen when…

The Galactic bulge, that is the prominent out-of-plane over-density present in the inner few kiloparsecs of the Galaxy, is a complex structure, as the morphology, kinematics, chemistry and ages of its stars indicate. To understand the…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2016-07-06 P. Di Matteo

Theoretically, inflowing filaments of gas are one of the main causes of growth for a galaxy. Nonetheless, observationally, probing ongoing gas accretion is challenging. As part of the Gas Stripping Phenomena in galaxies with MUSE (GASP)…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2018-02-22 B. Vulcani , B. M. Poggianti , A. Moretti , M. Mapelli , G. Fasano , J. Fritz , Y. Jaffe' , D. Bettoni , M. Gullieuszik , C. Bellhouse

A galaxy disk embedded in a rotating halo experiences a dynamical friction force which causes it to warp when the angular momentum axes of the disk and halo are misaligned. Our fully self-consistent simulations of this process induce…

Astrophysics · Physics 2009-10-31 Victor P. Debattista , J. A. Sellwood

Spirals in galaxies have long been thought to be caused by gravitational instability in the stellar component of the disk, but discerning the precise mechanism had proved elusive. Tidal interactions, and perhaps bars, may provoke some…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2022-09-28 J. A. Sellwood , Karen L. Masters

We report the detection of small scale bending waves, also known as corrugations, in the dust lanes of five nearby edge-on disc galaxies. This phenomenon, where the disc mid-plane bends to become wavy, just as in warps but on a smaller…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2020-06-03 Chaitra A. Narayan , Ralf-Juergen Dettmar , Kanak Saha

We suggest that the bulge-to-disc ratios of spiral galaxies are primarily determined by the angular momenta of their host haloes predicted in current hierarchical clustering models for structure formation. Gas with low specific angular…

Astrophysics · Physics 2007-05-23 Shude Mao , H. J. Mo