Related papers: Tree-ring structure of Galactic bar resonance
The Hypervelocity Star survey presents the currently largest sample of radial velocity measurements of halo stars out to 80 kpc. We apply spherical Jeans modeling to these data in order to derive the mass profile of the Galaxy. We restrict…
This is a speculative attempt to connect string theory with cosmological observation. Inspired by an exactly solvable model in string theory, and based on the assumption that all matter is made of strings, individual stars will couple…
We analyse the radial structure of self-gravitating spheres consisting of multiple interpenetrating fluids, such as the X-ray emitting gas and the dark halo of a galaxy cluster. In these dipolytropic models, adiabatic dark matter sits in…
Stellar bars are the most common non-axisymmetric structures in galaxies and their impact on the evolution of disc galaxies at all cosmological times can be significant. Classical theory predicts that stellar discs are stabilized against…
This paper explores resonance-driven secular evolution between a bar and dark-matter halo using N-body simulations. We make direct comparisons to our analytic theory (Weinberg & Katz 2005) to demonstrate the great difficulty that an N-body…
From the tangential velocities of stars all over the sky, one can, in a statistical way, infer their 3D velocity distribution. An application to Hipparcos data reveals rich structure in the planar stellar motions: there are several moving…
Supermassive black holes in the centre of galaxies dominate the gravitational potential of their surrounding stellar clusters. In these dense environments, stars follow nearly Keplerian orbits, which get slowly distorted as a result of the…
Our Galaxy is a barred spiral. Recent work based on the COBE NIR data implies a small bulge-bar and a disk with a short scale-length. The corotation radius of the bar is in the range 3-4.5 kpc. The stellar density distribution beyond the…
The late infall of cold dark matter onto an isolated galaxy such as our own produces flows with definite velocity vectors at any physical point in the galactic halo. It also produces caustics which are places where the dark matter density…
Microlensing has established itself as a powerful new method for the detection of baryonic dark matter in the Galaxy. The theory of microlensing is sketched and its similarity with the optical effect of twinkling is explained. The bulk of…
The recently discovered ring of stars near Galactocentric distance $r = 20$ kpc is interpreted as baryonic matter accreted onto the second caustic ring of dark matter in our galaxy. Caustic rings of dark matter were predicted in the…
The fragmentation of horizon crossing superstrings creates loops that accrete and bind to collapsing matter perturbations if the string tension is less than a critical value and if the loops are large-scale. For typical model parameters…
Mass loss rates for the tenuous, hot winds of cool stars are extremely difficult to measure, yet they are a crucial ingredient in the stars' rotational evolution. We present a new method for measuring these mass loss rates in young,…
There are multiple groups of comoving stars in the Solar neighbourhood, which can potentially be explained as the signatures of one of the fundamental resonances of non-axisymmetric structure such as the Galactic bar or spiral arms. One…
Many barred galaxies today harbor massive concentrations of gas in their centers, and some are known to possess supermassive black holes (SBHs) and their associated stellar cusps. Previous theoretical work has suggested that a bar in a…
Spiral density waves can arise in galactic disks as linear instabilities of the underlying stellar distribution function. Such an instability grows exponentially in amplitude at some fixed growth rate $\beta$ before saturating nonlinearly.…
The presence of dark gaps, a preferential light deficit along the bar minor axis, is observationally well known. The properties of dark gaps are thought to be associated with the properties of bars, and their spatial locations are often…
We propose a novel explanation for the Hercules stream consistent with recent measurements of the extent and pattern speed of the Galactic bar. We have adapted a made-to-measure dynamical model tailored for the Milky Way to investigate the…
We examine the bar instability in galactic models with an exponential disk and a cuspy dark matter (DM) halo with a Navarro-Frenk-White (NFW) cosmological density profile. We construct equilibrium models from a 3-integral composite…
Using a dataset of stars from a barred galaxy that provides instantaneous positions and velocities in the sky, we propose a method to identify its key structures, such as the central bar and spiral arms, and to determine the bar pattern…