Related papers: Structures in galaxies: nature versus nurture. Inp…
In the past years a wealth of observations has unraveled the structural properties of dark and luminous mass distribution in galaxies, a benchmark for understanding dark matter and the process of galaxy formation. The study of the…
Galaxy structure and morphology is nearly always studied using the light originating from stars, however ideally one is interested in measuring structure using the stellar mass distribution. Not only does stellar mass trace out the…
I attempt to summarize our knowledge of planet formation in evolving protoplanetary discs. I first review the physics of disc evolution and dispersal. For most of the disc lifetime evolution is driven by accretion and photoevaporation, and…
Dynamical evolution of spiral galaxies is strongly dependent on non-axisymmetric patterns that develop from gravitational instabilities, either spontaneously or externally triggered. Some evolutionary sequences are described through which a…
Our Milky Way Galaxy is a typical large spiral galaxy, representative of the most common morphological type in the local Universe. We can determine the properties of individual stars in unusual detail, and use the characteristics of the…
The challenge of dark matter may be addressed in two ways; by studying the confrontation of structure formation with observation and by direct and indirect searches. In this review, I will focus on those aspects of dark matter that are…
We discuss the main ingredients necessary to build models of chemical evolution of spiral galaxies and in particular the Milky Way galaxy. These ingredients include: the star formation rate, the initial mass function, the stellar yields and…
The presence of nuclear discs in barred disc galaxies has been demonstrated in studies on stellar structures and kinematics. It is thus imperative to establish their fundamental properties and scaling relations, which can help understanding…
The manner the galaxy accretes matter along with the star formation rates at different epochs, influence the evolution of the stable isotopic inventories of the galaxy. A detailed analysis is presented here to study the dependence of the…
In this review, we describe our current understanding of cluster formation: from the general picture of collapse from initial density fluctuations in an expanding Universe to detailed simulations of cluster formation including the effects…
We report first results from a series of N-body/gasdynamical simulations designed to study the origin of galaxy morphologies in a cold dark matter-dominated universe. The simulations include star formation and feedback and have numerical…
The formation, structure and evolution of protoplanetary discs is considered. The formation of giant planets within the environment of these models is also discussed.
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…
In this review, I give a brief summary of galaxy evolution processes in hierarchical cosmologies and of their relative importance at different masses, times, and environments. I remind the reader of the processes that are commonly included…
The investigation of the orientation of galaxies is a standard test concerning to scenarios of galaxy formation, because different theories of galaxy formation make various predictions regarding to the angular momentum of galaxies. The new…
According to the hierarchical model, small galaxies form first and merge together to form bigger objects. In parallel, galaxies assemble their mass through accretion from cosmic filaments. Recently, the increased spatial resolution of the…
Careful inspection of large-scale photographs of Shapley-Ames galaxies seems to show a smooth transition between the morphological characteristics of galaxies located on the narrow red, and on the broad blue, sequences in the galaxian…
Studies of nearby galaxies including the Milky Way have provided fundamental information on the evolution of structure in the Universe, the existence and nature of dark matter, the origin and evolution of galaxies, and the global features…
The formation of disk galaxies is one of the most outstanding problems in modern astrophysics and cosmology. We review the progress made by numerical simulations carried out on large parallel supercomputers. Recent progress stems from a…
Over the past three decades the established view of a nearly homogeneuous, featureless Universe on scales larger than a few Megaparsec has been completely overhauled. In particular through the advent of ever larger galaxy redshift surveys…