Related papers: Pattern Speed of Lopsidedness in Galactic Disks
Lopsidedness is common in disk galaxies, yet its origin and evolution remain unclear. Previous studies typically examined stellar and gas asymmetries separately, but a combined analysis offers a stronger probe of the mechanisms driving…
Many spiral galaxies show a large-scale asymmetry with a cos\phi dependence in their rotation curves as well as in their morphology, such as M101 and NGC 628. We show that both these features can be explained by the response of a galactic…
In this review, I discuss just three aspects of the stability and evolution of galactic discs. (1) I first review our understanding of the bar instability and how it can be controlled. Disc galaxies in which the orbital speed does not…
The origin of spiral patterns in galaxies is still not fully understood. Similar features also develop readily in N-body simulations of isolated cool, collisionless disks, yet even here the mechanism has yet to be explained. In this series…
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…
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…
Observations of lopsided spiral galaxies motivated us to explore whether the rapid passage of a companion galaxy could cause them. We examine whether the center of mass of the visible matter becomes displaced from the center of mass of the…
We expand our pervious numerical study of the properties of the stellar velocity distribution within the disk of a two-armed spiral galaxy by considering spiral stellar density waves with different global Fourier amplitudes, C_2. We confirm…
It has been known for a long time that a large fraction of disc galaxies are lopsided. We simulate three different mechanisms that can induce lopsidedness: flyby interactions, gas accretion from cosmological filaments and ram pressure from…
We investigate the angular distribution of satellite galaxies in and around pairs of galaxy groups in SDSS and compare the results with the satellite distribution in pairs of dark matter halos by constructing mock catalogs that account for…
The disks of spiral galaxies are generally elliptical rather than circular. The distribution of ellipticities can be fit with a log-normal distribution. For a sample of 12,764 galaxies from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey Data Release 1 (SDSS…
Many disk galaxies are lopsided: their brightest inner parts are displaced from the center of the outer isophotes, or the outer contours of the HI disk. This asymmetry is particularly common in small, low-luminosity galaxies. We argue here…
We study the azimuthal structure of the stellar disks of 18 face-on spiral galaxies, using K-band photometry to trace the stellar surface mass density. Assuming the disks are co-planar, we characterize their deviation from axisymmetry by…
We measure the non-axisymmetry in the luminosity distribution in the central few kpc of a sample of advanced mergers of galaxies, by analyzing their 2MASS images. All mergers show a high central asymmetry: the centres of isophotes show a…
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…
The properties of spatial distribution of luminous matter are investigated analysing all the available three dimensional catalogues of galaxies. In standard view, galaxies are believed to have a fractal distribution at small scale with a…
For disk galaxies (spirals and irregulars), the inner circular-velocity gradient (inner steepness of the rotation curve) correlates with the central surface brightness with a slope of ~0.5. This implies that the central dynamical mass…
Mass models of galactic disks traditionally rely on axisymmetric density and rotation curves, paradoxically acting as if their most remarkable asymmetric features, such as lopsidedness or spiral arms, were not important. In this article, we…
The density-wave theory of spiral structure proposes that star formation occurs in or near a spiral-shaped region of higher density that rotates rigidly within the galactic disk at a fixed pattern speed. In most interpretations of this…
The frequently observed lopsidedness of the distribution of stars and gas in disc galaxies is still considered as a major problem in galaxy dynamics. It is even discussed as an imprint of the formation history of discs and the evolution of…