Related papers: Secular evolution and cylindrical rotation in boxy…
Many disc galaxies host galactic bars, which exert time-dependent, non-axisymmetric forces that can alter the orbits of stars. There should be both angle and radius-dependence in the resulting radial rearrangement of stars ('radial mixing')…
Recent large scale surveys of galactic bulge stars allowed to build a detailed map of the bulge kinematics. The bulge exhibits cylindrical rotation consistent with a disky origin which evolved through bar driven secular evolution. However…
A multi-faceted approach is described to constrain the importance of bar-driven evolution in disk galaxies, particularly bulge formation. N-body simulations are used to construct stellar kinematic bar diagnostics for edge-on systems and to…
Using three fiducial Nbody+SPH simulations, we follow the merging of two disk galaxies with a hot gaseous halo component each, and examine whether the merger remnant can be a spiral galaxy. The stellar progenitor disks are destroyed by…
Strong galactic bars produced in simulations tend to undergo a period of buckling instability that weakens and thickens them and forms a boxy/peanut structure in their central parts. This theoretical prediction has been confirmed by…
Young stellar bars in disk galaxies experience a vertical buckling instability which terminates their growth and thickens them, resulting in a characteristic peanut/boxy shape when viewed edge on. Using N-body simulations of galactic disks…
Barred galaxies have interesting morphological features whose presence and properties set constraints on galactic evolution. Here we examine barlenses, i.e. lens-like components whose extent along the bar major axis is shorter than that of…
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…
It is an observational fact that bulges of spiral galaxies contain a high fraction of old and metal-rich stars. Following this observational fact, we have investigated colors of 21 bulges hosted by a selected sample of high surface…
Galaxy formation in the current cosmological paradigm is a very complex process in which inflows, outflows, interactions and mergers are common events. These processes can redistribute the angular momentum content of baryons. Recent…
Gas-rich disks in the early universe are highly turbulent and have giant star-forming clumps. Models suggest the clumps form by gravitational instabilities, and if they resist disruption by star formation, then they interact, lose angular…
We suggest that the bulge-to-disc ratios of spiral galaxies are primarily determined by the angular momenta of their host haloes predicted in current hierarchical clustering models for structure formation. Gas with low specific angular…
We explore the evolution of a giant planet that interacts with a circumbinary disc that orbits a misaligned binary by means of analytic models and hydrodynamical simulations. Planet-disc interactions lead to mutual tilt oscillations between…
The Milky Way is a barred galaxy whose central bulge has a box/peanut shape and consists of multiple stellar populations with different orbit distributions. This review describes dynamical and chemo-dynamical equilibrium models for the…
A tantalizing enigma in extragalactic astronomy concerns the chronology and driving mechanisms of the build-up of late-type galaxies (LTGs). The standard scenario envisages two formation routes, with classical bulges (CBs) assembling first…
Recent ground-based photometric investigations suggest that central regions of late-type spirals are closely coupled to the inner disk and probably formed via secular evolution. Evidence presented in support of this model includes the…
We show that direct detection and measurement of the vertically thickened parts of bars (so-called "boxy" or "peanut-shaped" bulges) is possible not only for edge-on galaxies but also for galaxies with moderate inclinations (i < 70 deg),…
We analyse the output of the hi-res cosmological zoom-in simulation ErisBH to study self-consistently the formation of a strong stellar bar in a Milky Way-type galaxy and its effect on the galactic structure, on the central gas distribution…
We numerically integrated the orbits of 1458 particles in the region of the classical Kuiper Belt (41 AU < a < 47 AU) to explore the role of dynamical instabilities in sculpting the inclination distribution of the classical Kuiper Belt…
Massive eccentric disks (gaseous or particulate) orbiting a dominant central mass appear in many astrophysical systems, including planetary rings, protoplanetary and accretion disks in binaries, and nuclear stellar disks around supermassive…