Related papers: Spin-up of massive classical bulges during secular…
The assembly of the Milky Way bulge is an old topic in astronomy, one now in a period of renewed and rapid development. The dominant scenario for bulge formation is that of the Milky Way as a nearly pure disk galaxy, with the inner disk…
The {\Lambda} cold dark matter ({\Lambda}CDM) paradigm of galaxy formation predicts that dense spheroidal stellar structures invariably grow at early cosmic time. These primordial spheroids evolve toward a virialized dynamical status as…
The latest generation of cosmological simulations are on the verge of being able to resolve the structure of bulges for the first time. Hence, we review the current state of bulge formation in cosmological simulations, and discuss open…
The growth of black holes (BHs) in disk galaxies lacking classical bulges, which implies an absence of significant mergers, appears to be driven by secular processes. Short bars of sub-kiloparsec radius have been hypothesized to be an…
This paper provides a summary of our recent work on the scaling relations between the specific angular momentum j_* and mass M_* of the stellar parts of normal galaxies of different bulge fraction beta_*. We find that the observations are…
I discuss several aspects of secular evolution linked to bars and to boxy/peanut bulges, based on a very large number of high resolution, fully self-consistent $N$-body simulations. When the bar forms, it is as thin as the disc. Its…
We seek to understand whether the stellar populations of galactic bulges show fingerprints of secular evolution triggered by the presence of the disc. For this purpose we re-analyse the sample of Proctor and Sansom, deriving stellar…
We use cosmological hydrodynamical simulations to show that a significant fraction of the gas in high redshift rare massive halos falls nearly radially to their very centre on extremely short timescales. This process results in the…
Stellar bars are a common morphological feature of spiral galaxies. While it is known that they can form in isolation, or be induced tidally, few studies have explored the production of stellar bars in galaxy merging. We look to investigate…
We present a detailed study of the shape of the innermost part of the rotation curves of a sample of 29 nearby spiral galaxies, based on high angular and spectral resolution kinematic Halpha Fabry-Perot observations. In particular, we…
Stellar bars are important for the secular evolution of disk galaxies because they can drive gas into the galactic central regions. To investigate the star formation properties in barred galaxies, we presented a multi-wavelength study of…
Kn-band imaging of a sample of 30 edge-on spiral galaxies with a boxy or peanut-shaped (B/PS) bulge is discussed. Galaxies with a B/PS bulge tend to have a more complex morphology than galaxies with other bulge types, unsharp-masked images…
Many barred galaxies, possibly including the Milky Way, have cusps in the centres. There is a widespread belief, however, that usual bar instability taking place in bulgeless galaxy models is impossible for the cuspy models, because of the…
Cosmological simulations show that dark matter halos surrounding baryonic disks have a wide range of angular momenta, measured by the spin parameter ($\lambda$). In this study, we bring out the importance of inner angular momentum($<$30…
We present the results of a series of numerical simulations aimed to study the evolution of a disc galaxy within the global tidal field of a group environment. Both the disc galaxy and the group are modelled as multi-component,…
For several decades it has been known that stellar bars in disc galaxies can be triggered by interactions, or by internal processes such as dynamical instabilities. In this work, we explore the differences between these two mechanisms using…
We investigate the stellar population properties of pseudo-bulges in barred galaxies drawn from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS DR7) to assess how bars regulate central star formation and secular evolution. Our sample comprises barred…
This is the summary chapter of a review book on galaxy bulges. Bulge properties and formation histories are more varied than those of ellipticals. I emphasize two advances: 1 - "Classical bulges" are observationally indistinguishable from…
We study the origin of bulge stars and their angular momentum (AM) evolution in 10 spiral galaxies with baryonic masses above $10^{10}$M$_\odot$ in the NIHAO galaxy formation simulations. The simulated galaxies are in good agreement with…
The majority of massive disk galaxies, including our own, have stellar bars with vertically thick inner regions -- so-called "boxy/peanut-shaped" (B/P) bulges. The most commonly suggested mechanism for the formation of B/P bulges is a…