Related papers: Polar disk galaxy found in wall between voids
I discuss various proposed formation scenarios for the metal-poor components of the Milky Way Galaxy, emphasising the stellar halo and the thick disk. Interactions and accretion played a significant role in Galactic evolution, in particular…
We present results concerning the internal structure and kinematics of disk galaxies formed in cosmologically motivated simulations. The calculations include dark matter, gas dynamics, radiative cooling, star formation, supernova feedback…
Young stars in the disks of galaxies produce HI from their parent H2 clouds by photodissociation. This paper describes the observational evidence for and the morphology of such HI. Simple estimates of the amount of dissociated gas lead to…
Large self-gravitating stellar systems share with correlated liquids in condensed matter physics a pattern of hierarchical density variations. While it takes the microscopic time resolution to discern the correlated dynamics of the critical…
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…
High--resolution 2D--MHD numerical simulations have been carried out to investigate the effects of continuing infall of clumpy gas in extended HI galactic disks. Given a certain accretion rate, the response of the disk depends on its…
Polarimetric observations of T Tauri and Herbig Ae/Be stars are a powerful way to image protoplanetary disks. However, interpretation of these images is difficult because the degree of polarization is highly sensitive to the angle of…
The black hole in our Galactic Center is extremely underluminous for the amount of hot gas available for accretion. Theoretical understanding of this fact rests on a likely but not entirely certain assumption that the electrons in the…
In the last few years new evidence has been presented for the presence of ongoing massive star formation in the outer HI disks of galaxies. These discoveries strongly suggest that precursor molecular gas must also be present in some…
There is mounting evidence for an extra-planar gas layer around the Milky Way disk, similar to the anomalous HI gas detected in a few other galaxies. As much as 10% of the gas may be in this phase. We analyze HI clouds located in the…
We analyze an adaptive mesh refinement hydrodynamic cosmological simulation of a Milky Way-sized galaxy to study the cold gas in the halo. HI observations of the Milky Way and other nearby spirals have revealed the presence of such gas in…
We study the formation of disks via the cooling flow of gas within galactic haloes using smoothed particle hydrodynamics simulations. These simulations resolve mass scales of a few thousand solar masses in the gas component for the first…
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 address the puzzling observational indications for very "cold" galactic discs at redshifts $z \gtrsim 3$, an epoch when discs are expected to be highly perturbed. Using a high-resolution cosmological zoom-in simulation, we identify such…
Star formation in most galaxies requires cosmic gas accretion because the gas consumption time is short compared to the Hubble time. This accretion presumably comes from a combination of infalling satellite debris, cold flows, and…
While it is widely accepted that planets are formed in protoplanetary disks, there is still much debate on when this process happens. In a few cases protoplanets have been directly imaged, but for the vast majority of systems, disk gaps and…
Galaxies are not distributed randomly throughout space but are instead arranged in an intricate "cosmic web" of filaments and walls surrounding bubble-like voids. There is still no compelling observational evidence of a link between the…
The presence of spiral structure in isolated galaxies is a problem that has only been partially explained by theoretical models. Because the rate and pattern of star formation in the disk must depend only on mechanisms internal to the disk,…
We present a dynamical model for the formation and evolution of a massive disk galaxy, within a growing dark halo whose mass evolves according to cosmological simulations of structure formation. The galactic evolution is simulated with a…
I review the results of recent cosmological simulations of galaxy formation that highlight the importance of satellite accretion in the formation of galactic disks. Tidal debris of disrupted satellites may contribute to the disk component…