Related papers: Galactic disks and their evolution
Deep photometric surveys of the Milky Way have revealed diffuse structures encircling our Galaxy far beyond the "classical" limits of the stellar disk. This paper reviews results from our own and other observational programs, which together…
Galaxies are observed to obey a strict set of dynamical scaling relations. We review these relations for rotationally supported disk galaxies spanning many decades in mass, surface brightness, and gas content. The behavior of these widely…
For several decades now, open clusters have been used to study the structure and chemical evolution of the disk of our Galaxy. Due to the fact that their ages and metallicities can be determined with relatively good precision, and since…
We review progress in understanding the formation of galactic disks in the standard cosmogonic scenario involving gravitational clustering of baryons and dark matter and dissipative collapse of the baryons. This scenario accounts remarkably…
A new view on our Galaxy has recently emerged, with large consequences on its formation scenarios. Not only new dwarf satellites have been detected, still orbiting and tidally disrupting, but also a multitude of stellar streams or tidal…
In this small review we present the actual state the knowledge about weighting black holes. Black holes can be found in stellar binary systems in our Galaxy and in other nearby galaxies, in globular clusters, which we can see in our and…
How do galaxies form and evolve? This is one of the most puzzling questions in astronomy. Galaxy assembly takes place throughout the entire history of the Universe, but our understanding of it is hampered by the unfortunate fact that we can…
Dark matter is one of the pillars of the current standard model of structure formation: it is assumed to constitute most of the matter in the Universe. However, it can so far only be probed indirectly through its gravitational effects, and…
We review the most recent evidence for the amazing properties of the density distribution of dark matter around spiral galaxies. Their rotation curves, coadded according to the galaxy luminosity, conform to an universal profile which can be…
Once understood as the paradigm of passively evolving objects, the discovery that massive galaxies experienced an enormous structural evolution in the last ten billion years has opened an active line of research. The most significant…
The presence of gaseous X-ray halos around massive galaxies is a basic prediction of all past and modern structure formation simulations. The importance of these X-ray halos is further emphasized by the fact that they retain signatures of…
Can the present dynamics of spiral galaxies tell us something about the merging history, the formation and evolution of disks? Galaxy interactions thicken or destroy disks; the simultaneous presence of thick and thin disks is a tracer of…
This review discusses (i) dynamical methods for determining the masses of Galactic and extragalactic star clusters, (ii) dynamical processes and their time-scales for the evolution of clusters, including evaporation, mass segregation, core…
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,…
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…
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…
The standard framework within which cosmological measurements are confronted and interpreted nowadays, called Lambda Cold Dark Matter, presents a Universe dominated by unknown forms of energy and matter. My Thesis is devoted to investigate…
I briefly review the growing evidence that thick stellar disks surround most edge-on disk galaxies. Recent studies show that these extragalactic thick disks have old ages, low metallicities, long scale lengths, and moderately flattened…
We present a scenario for the formation of disks which explains not only the properties of normal galaxies, but the properties of the population of low surface brightness galaxies (LSBs) as well. We use a gravitationally self-consistent…
I present detailed models for the formation of disk galaxies, and investigate which observables are best suited as virial mass estimators. Contrary to naive expectations, the luminosities and circular velocities of disk galaxies are…