Related papers: Structure, mass and stability of galactic disks
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…
Most of the visible mass in a typical spiral galaxy is distributed in a thin disk, with a radial extent much larger than its thickness. While the planar disk structure, including non-axisymmetric features such as spiral structure, has been…
We still do not have a "standard" model for the mass distribution of spiral galaxies. I review various methods used to delimit the range of values of the mass-to-light ratio of the disk, such as spiral structure criteria, the influence of…
This chapter reviews theoretical work on the stellar dynamics of galaxy disks. All the known collective global instabilities are identified, and their mechanisms described in terms of local wave mechanics. A detailed discussion of warps and…
The presence of radial truncations in stellar disks is reviewed. There is ample evidence that many disk galaxies have relatively shaprt truncations in their disks. These often are symmetric and independent of the wavelength band of the…
We present results of numerical N-body simulations of a galactic stellar disk embedded into a spherical dark halo. The non-linear dynamics of bending instabilities developing in the disk is studied. The bending modes, axisymmetric and not,…
One the most cited papers in astronomy is Ken Freeman's 1970 paper on exponential disks in galaxies. In this contribution I review what has been done in this area since then and what we can infer about systematic properties of disks in…
The relationship between the geometrical properties of stellar disks (a flatness and truncation radius) and the disk kinematics are considered for edge-on galaxies. It is shown that the observed thickness of the disks and the approximate…
The formation and evolution of galactic disks is particularly important for understanding how galaxies form and evolve, and the cause of the variety in which they appear to us. Ongoing large surveys, made possible by new instrumentation at…
I describe how the dynamics of galactic disks can be inferred by imaging and spectroscopy. Next I demonstrate that the decomposition of the rotation curves of spiral galaxies into the contributions by the various components of the galaxies…
Recent work on the mass distribution in spiral galaxies, using mainly HI observations, is reviewed. The principal problem is still to determine to what extent the dark matter is important in the inner parts of a galaxy, or in other words,…
The `maximum' disk hypothesis of galactic disks imbedded in dark matter halos is examined. First, decompositions of the rotation curves of NGC 2613, 3198, 6503, and 7184 are analyzed. For these galaxies the radial velocity dispersions of…
The formation of galactic discs and the efficiency of star formation within them are issues central to our understanding of galaxy formation. We have developed a detailed and versatile model of disc formation which combines the strengths of…
We consider the key problems related to measuring the mass of stellar disks and dark halos in galaxies and to explaining the observed properties of disks formed in massive dark halos.
We consider seven distant galaxies with clearly evident spiral structure from HST images. Three of these were chosen from Vogt et al. (1996) (VFP) and have measured rotational velocities. Five were chosen from the Medium Deep Survey and are…
We estimate the masses of disks of galaxies using the marginal gravitational stability criterion and compare them with the photometrical disk mass evaluations. The comparison reveals that the stellar disks of most of spiral galaxies we…
We consider a thickness of stellar disks of late-type galaxies by analyzing the R and K_s band photometric profiles for two independent samples of edge-on galaxies. The main goal is to verify a hypotesis that a thickness of old stellar…
This paper considers gravitational perturbations in geometrically thin disks with rotation curves dominated by a central object, but with substantial contributions from magnetic pressure and tension. The treatment is general, but the…
The existence of dark matter in the Galactic disk has been a topic of significant debate, especially over the past two decades. Evidence for dark matter in the disk, a component in addition to the now well-proven dark matter halo, has been…
The colour and metallicity gradients observed in spiral galaxies suggest that the mass-to-light ratio (M*/L) of the stellar disc is a function of radius. This is indeed predicted by chemo-photometric models of galactic discs. We investigate…