Related papers: When Should We Treat Galaxies as Isolated?
Self-gravitating systems evolve toward the most tightly bound configuration that is reachable via available evolution processes. The inner parts shrink and the outer parts expand, provided that some physical process transports energy or…
Disk galaxies evolve over time through processes that may rearrange both the radial mass profile and the metallicity distribution within the disk. This review of such slow changes is largely, though not entirely, restricted to…
Galaxy evolution is in transition from an early universe dominated by hierarchical clustering to a future dominated by secular processes. These result from interactions involving collective phenomena such as bars, oval disks, spiral…
New observations in favour of a significant role of secular evolution are reviewed: central star formation boosted in pseudo-bulge barred galaxies, relations between bulge and disk, evidence for rejuvenated bulges. Numerical simulations…
Deep surveys conducted during the past decades have shown that galaxies in the distant universe are generally of more irregular shapes, and are disky in appearance and in their star formation rate, compared to galaxies in similar…
We review internal secular evolution in galaxy disks -- the fundamental process by which isolated disks evolve. We concentrate on the buildup of dense central features that look like classical, merger-built bulges but that were made slowly…
Galaxy disks evolve through angular momentum transfers between sub-components, like gas, stars, or dark matter halos, through non axi-symmetric instabilities. The speed of this evolution is boosted in presence of a large fraction of cold…
The secular evolution process which slowly transforms the morphology of a given galaxy over its lifetime through mostly internal dynamical mechanisms could naturally account for most of the observed properties of physical galaxies (Zhang…
Today we have numerous evidences that spirals evolve dynamically through various secular or episodic processes, such as bar formation and destruction, bulge growth and mergers, sometimes over much shorter periods than the standard galaxy…
Mass accretion is the key factor for evolution of galaxies. It can occur through secular evolution, when gas in the outer parts is driven inwards by dynamical instabilities, such as spirals or bars. This secular evolution proceeds very…
It was argued in the past that bulges of galaxies cannot be formed through collisionless secular evolution because that would violate constraints on the phase-space density: the phase-space density in bulges is several times larger than in…
We review internal processes of secular evolution in galaxy disks, concentrating on the buildup of dense central features that look like classical, merger-built bulges but that were made slowly out of disk gas. We call these pseudobulges.…
The secular evolution process, which slowly transforms the morphology of a galaxy over its lifetime, could naturally account for observed properties of the great majority of physical galaxies if both stellar and gaseous accretion processes…
We use high resolution collisionless $N$-body simulations to study the secular evolution of disk galaxies and in particular the final properties of disks that suffer a bar and perhaps a bar-buckling instability. Although we find that bars…
We present a theoretical model for the evolution of mass, angular momentum and size of galaxy disks and bulges, and we implement it into the semi-analytic galaxy formation code SAGE. The model follows both secular and violent evolutionary…
The aim of this work is to study the effects of environment on the growth in size of galaxies. We examine the stellar mass-size relation for a sample of isolated galaxies interpreted as stellar systems where evolution has been mainly…
Observational and theoretical evidence that internal, slow ("secular") evolution reshapes galaxy disks is reviewed in Kormendy & Kennicutt (2004, ARAA, 42, 603). This update has three aims. First, I emphasize that this evolution is very…
We investigate the orbital evolution of a system of N mutually interacting stars on initially circular orbits around the dominating central mass. We include perturbative influence of a distant axisymmetric source and an extended spherical…
Recent observations indicate a remarkable similarity in the properties of evolving galaxies at fixed mass and redshift, prompting us to consider the possibility that most galaxies may evolve with a common history encompassing star…
This work investigates the fundamental mechanism(s) that drive galaxy evolution in the Local Universe. By comparing two proxies of star-formation sensitive to different timescales, such as EW(H$\alpha$) and colours like $g-r$, one may…