Related papers: Bending instability in galactic discs. Advocacy of…
We present numerical simulations of misaligned discs around a spinning black hole covering a range of parameters. Previous simulations have shown that discs that are strongly warped by a forced precession -- in this case the Lense-Thirring…
The role of gravitational instability-driven turbulence in determining the structure and evolution of disk galaxies, and the extent to which gravity rather than feedback can explain galaxy properties, remains an open question. To address…
The relaxed motion of stars and gas in galactic discs is well approximated by a rotational velocity that is a function of radial position only, implying that individual components have lost any information about their prior states.…
We address the cosmological evolution of violent gravitational instability in high-redshift, massive, star-forming galactic discs. To this aim, we integrate in time the equations of mass and energy conservation under self-regulated…
Many accretion discs have been found to be distorted: either warped due a misalignment in the system, or non-circular as a result of orbital eccentricity or tidal deformation by a binary companion. Warped, eccentric, and tidally distorted…
We analyse disc heating and radial migration in N-body models of growing disc galaxies with thick and thin discs. Similar to thin-disc-only models, galaxies with appropriate non-axisymmetric structures reproduce observational constraints on…
Using a new algorithm for estimating the actions of orbits a parametrised distribution function is automatically fitted to observational data for the solar neighbourhood. We adopt a gravitational potential that is generated by three discs…
(Abridged) We analyse the stability and evolution of power-law accretion disc models. These have midplane densities that follow radial power-laws, and have either temperature or entropy distributions that are power-law functions of…
Self-gravitating stellar disks with random motion support both exponentially growing and, in some cases, purely oscillatory axisymmetric bending modes, unlike their cold disk counterparts. A razor-thin disk with even a very small degree of…
The secular evolution of an infinitely thin tepid isolated galactic disc made of a finite number of particles is described using the inhomogeneous Balescu-Lenard equation. Assuming that only tightly wound transient spirals are present in…
Astrophysical discs which are sufficiently massive and cool are linearly unstable to the formation of axisymmetric structures. In practice, linearly stable discs of surface density slightly below the threshold needed for this instability…
We report the finding of a linear, non-axisymmetric, global instability in gas discs around stars, which may be relevant to other astrophysical discs. It takes the form of an $m=1$ mode that grows in the disc density distribution while the…
We study the effect of dissipational gas physics on the vertical heating and thickening of disc galaxies during minor mergers. We produce a suite of minor merger simulations for Milky Way-like galaxies. This suite consists of collisionless…
We present evidence that isolated growing discs, subject to internal spiral perturbations, thicken due to both heating \emph{and} radial migration. We show this by demonstrating that the thickness and vertical velocity dispersions of coeval…
The origin of turbulence in accretion discs is still not fully understood. While the magneto-rotational instability is considered to operate in sufficiently ionized discs, its role in the poorly ionized protoplanetary disc is questionable.…
We investigate the linear axisymmetric viscous overstability in dense planetary rings with typical values of the dynamical optical depth $\tau\gtrsim 0.5$. We develop a granular flow model which accounts for the particulate nature of a…
In this work we update the L-Galaxies semi-analytic model (SAM) to better follow the physical processes responsible for the growth of bulges via disc instabilities (leading to pseudo-bulges) and mergers (leading to classical bulges). We…
The secular thickening of a discrete self-gravitating galactic disc is investigated using the inhomogeneous multi-component Balescu-Lenard equation. The thick WKB limit for the diffusion and drift coefficients is found using the epicyclic…
Warps are observed in a large fraction of disc galaxies, and can be due to a large number of different processes. Some of these processes might also cause vertical heating and flaring. Using a sample of galaxies simulated in their…
We develop an analytic model to calculate the rate at which galaxy disks are heated by dark matter substructures orbiting in their halos. The model takes into account the internal structure, mass function and accretion rate of satellites…