Related papers: Galaxy Bulges and Elliptical Galaxies - Lecture No…
(Abridged) A variety of formation scenarios was proposed to explain the diversity of properties observed in bulges. Studying their intrinsic shape can help in constraining the dominant mechanism at the epochs of their assembly. The…
The Milky Way bulge offers a unique opportunity to investigate in detail the role that different processes such as dynamical instabilities, hierarchical merging, and dissipational collapse may have played in the history of the Galaxy…
From this vast subject, I will pick out and review three specific topics, namely the formation and evolution of bars, the formation of bulges, and the evolution during multiple major mergers. Bars form naturally in galactic discs. Their…
We have observed 60 edge-on galaxies in the NIR in order to study the stellar distribution in galaxies with box/peanut-shaped bulges. The much smaller amount of dust extinction at these wavelengths allows us to identify in almost all target…
The existence of a classical bulge in disk galaxies holds important clue to the assembly history of galaxies. Finding observational evidence of very low mass classical bulges particularly in barred galaxies including our Milky Way, is a…
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…
We investigate the clustering properties and close neighbour counts for galaxies with different types of bulges and stellar masses. We select samples of "classical" and "pseudo" bulges, as well as "bulge-less" disk galaxies, based on the…
The class `bulges' contains objects with very different formation and evolution paths and very different properties. I review two types of `bulges', the boxy/peanut bulges (B/Ps) and the discy bulges. The former are parts of bars seen…
Bulges are commonly believed to form in the dynamical violence of galaxy collisions and mergers. Here we model the stellar kinematics of the Bulge Radial Velocity Assay (BRAVA), and find no sign that the Milky Way contains a classical bulge…
Near infrared images from the COBE satellite presented the first clear evidence that our Milky Way galaxy contains a boxy shaped bulge. Recent years have witnessed a gradual paradigm shift in the formation and evolution of the Galactic…
This review focuses on flat and superthin galaxies. These are edge-on bulgeless galaxies, which are composed of a simple, stellar disk. The properties of these simple disks are at the end of a continuum that extends smoothly from…
The Galactic bulge is the central spheroid of our Galaxy, containing about one quarter of the total stellar mass of the Milky Way (M_bulge=1.8x10^10 M_sun; Sofue, Honma & Omodaka 2009). Being older than the disk, it is the first massive…
Close examination of so-called "pseudobulges" in several early-type disk galaxies indicates that they are actually composite structures consisting of both a flattened, kinematically cool disklike structure ("disky pseudobulge") and a…
We review current knowledge on the structure, properties and evolution of galactic bulges, considering particularly common preconceptions in the light of recent observational results.
The vertical profiles of disc galaxies are built by the material trapped around stable periodic orbits, which form their "skeletons". According to this, the knowledge of the stability of the main families of periodic orbits in appropriate…
In its first part, this paper summarizes recent work on the mass and shape of the Galactic dark halo. The second part presents a review of the large-scale structure of the Milky Way, and of the evidence that the inner Galaxy is dominated by…
Flattened bulges with disk-like properties are considered to be the end product of secular evolution processes at work in the inner regions of galaxies. On the contrary, classical bulges are characterized by rounder shapes and thought to be…
A century ago, in 1911 and 1913, Plummer and then Reynolds introduced their models to describe the radial distribution of stars in `nebulae'. This article reviews the progress since then, providing both an historical perspective and a…
Based on SDSS data, we have selected a sample of nine edge-on spiral galaxies with bulges whose major axes show a high inclination to the disk plane. Such objects are called polar-bulge galaxies. They are similar in their morphology to…
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…