Related papers: The quest for a stable disk
We study gravitational lensing by spiral galaxies, using realistic models consisting of halo, disk, and bulge components combined to produce a flat rotation curve. Proper dynamical normalization of the models is critical because a disk…
The saturation conditions for bending modes in inhomogeneous thin stellar disks that follow from an analysis of the dispersion relation are compared with those derived from $N$-body simulations. In the central regions of inhomogeneous…
The formation of thick stellar disks in spiral galaxies is studied. Simulations of gas-rich young galaxies show formation of internal clumps by gravitational instabilities, clump coalescence into a bulge, and disk thickening by strong…
We consider seven distant galaxies with clearly evident spiral structure from HST images. Three of these were chosen from Vogt et al. (1996) (VFP) and have measured rotational velocities. Five were chosen from the Medium Deep Survey and are…
This paper considers gravitational perturbations in geometrically thin disks with rotation curves dominated by a central object, but with substantial contributions from magnetic pressure and tension. The treatment is general, but the…
We analyze the first cosmological simulations that recover the fragmentation of high-redshift galactic discs driven by cold streams. The fragmentation is recovered owing to an AMR resolution better than 70 pc with cooling below 10^4 K. We…
We carry out three dimensional smoothed particle hydrodynamics simulations to study the impact of planet-disc interactions on a gravitationally unstable protoplanetary disc. We find that the impact of a planet on the disc's evolution can be…
Fragmentation of a spiral arm is thought to drive the formation of giant clumps in galaxies. Using linear perturbation analysis for self-gravitating spiral arms, we derive an instability parameter and define the conditions for clump…
While the total interior mass of a galaxy is reasonably well determined by a good rotation curve, the relative contributions from disk, bulge and halo are only weakly constrained by one-dimensional data. Barred galaxies are intrinsically…
We analyze the structural and dynamical properties of disk-like objects formed in fully consistent cosmological simulations which include inefficient star formation. Comparison with data of similar observable properties of spiral galaxies…
We investigate the structure of galaxies formed in a suite of high-resolution cosmological simulations. Consistent with observations of high-redshift galaxies, our simulated galaxies show irregular, prolate shapes, which are dominated by…
To break the degeneracy among galactic stellar components, we extract kinematic structures using the framework described in Du et al. (2019, 2020). For example, the concept of stellar halos is generalized to weakly-rotating structures that…
We present a dynamical model for the formation and evolution of a massive disk galaxy, within a growing dark halo whose mass evolves according to cosmological simulations of structure formation. The galactic evolution is simulated with a…
The presence of a well-defined and narrow dust lane in an edge-on spiral galaxy is the observational signature of a thin and dense molecular disk, in which gravitational collapse has overcome turbulence. Using a sample of galaxies out to…
The low surface brightness galaxies are gas-rich and yet have a low star formation rate, this is a well-known puzzle. The spiral features in these galaxies are weak and difficult to trace, although this aspect has not been studied much.…
We investigate the effects of halo kinematics on the dynamics of stellar discs by simulating the evolution of isolated disc-halo systems from equilibrium initial conditions. Our main results come from four simulations where the initial disc…
We use N-body simulations of bar formation in isolated galaxies to study the effect of bulge mass and bulge concentration on bar formation. Bars are global disk instabilities that evolve by transferring angular momentum from the inner to…
A substantial fraction of the warps in spiral galaxies may result from bending instabilities if the disks are essentially self-gravitating. With N-body simulations, we show that galaxies with self-gravitating disks as thick as HI disks are…
We study gravitational instabilities in disks, with special attention to the most massive clumps that form because they are expected to be the progenitors of globular-type clusters. The maximum unstable mass is set by rotation and depends…
Over the past 10 Gyr, star-forming galaxies have changed dramatically, from clumpy and gas rich, to rather quiescent stellar-dominated disks with specific star formation rates lower by factors of a few tens. We present a general theoretical…