Related papers: Disk heating and stellar migration in galaxies
We study the role of radial migration of stars on the chemical evolution of the Milky Way disk. In particular, we are interested in the impact of that process on the local properties of the disk (age-metallicity relation and its dispersion,…
Stars in the Galactic disc, including the Solar system, have deviated from their birth orbits and have experienced radial mixing and vertical heating. By performing hydrodynamical simulations of a galactic disc, we investigate how much…
Current understanding of the secular evolution of galactic disks suggests that this process is dominated by two or more heating mechanisms, which increase the random motions of stars in the disk. In particular, the gravitational influence…
Stellar migration, whether due to trapping by transient spirals (churning), or to scattering by non-axisymmetric perturbations, has been proposed to explain the presence of stars in outer disks. After a review of the basic theory, we…
We present a study of the extent to which the Sellwood & Binney radial migration of stars is affected by their vertical motion about the midplane. We use both controlled simulations in which only a single spiral mode is excited, as well as…
We employ high-resolution N-body simulations of isolated spiral galaxy models, from low-amplitude, multi-armed galaxies to Milky Way-like disks, to estimate the vertical action of ensembles of stars in an axisymmetric potential. In the…
The evolution of the Milky Way disk, which contains most of the stars in the Galaxy, is affected by several phenomena. For example, the bar and the spiral arms of the Milky Way induce radial migration of stars and can trap or scatter stars…
We use a suite of numerical simulations to investigate the mechanisms and effects of radial migration of stars in disk galaxies like the Milky Way (MW). An isolated, collisionless stellar disk with a MW-like scale-height shows only the…
We use numerical simulations to examine the effects of radial migration on the vertical structure of galaxy disks. The simulations follow three exponential disks of different mass but similar circular velocity, radial scalelength, and…
We consider a differentially rotating, 2D stellar disk perturbed by two steady state spiral density waves moving at different patterns speeds. Our investigation is based on direct numerical integration of initially circular test-particle…
We study how migration affects stars of a galaxy with a thin stellar disc and thicker stellar components. The simulated galaxy has a strong bar and lasting spiral arms. We find that the amplitude of the churning (change in angular momentum)…
[Abridge] In the first paper of this series (paper I) we presented a new approach for studying the chemo-odynamical evolution in disk galaxies, focusing on the Milky Way. Here we extend these results to different distances from the Galactic…
We characterize empirically the radial diffusion of stars in the plane of a typical barred disk galaxy by calculating the local spatial diffusion coefficient and diffusion time-scale for bulge-disk-halo N-body self-consistent systems which…
We consider a differentially rotating, 2D stellar disk perturbed by two steady state spiral density waves moving at different patterns speeds. Our investigation is based on direct numerical integration of initially circular test-particle…
We have recently identified a previously unknown radial migration mechanism resulting from the overlap of spiral and bar resonances in galactic discs (Minchev & Famaey 2010, Minchev et al. 2010). This new mechanism is much more efficient…
The first mechanism invoked to explain the existence of the thick disk in the Milky Way Galaxy, were the spiral arms. Up-to-date work summon several other possibilities that together seem to better explain this component of our Galaxy. All…
Reconstructing the star formation history (SFH) of disk galaxies is central to understanding their growth and evolution, yet such estimates can be strongly biased by stellar radial migration over cosmic time. Using 186 Milky Way (MW) and…
The separation of the Milky Way disk into a thin and thick component is supported by differences in the spatial, kinematic and metallicity distributions of their stars. These differences have led to the view that the thick disk formed early…
The radial distribution of mass in a disk galaxy is strongly constrained by its rotation curve. The separate contributions from the individual stellar populations and dark matter (DM) are not easily disentangled, however, especially since…
Previous models of galactic disk heating in interactions invoke restrictive assumptions not necessarily valid in modern LCDM contexts: that satellites and orbits are rigid and circular, with slow decay over many orbital times from dynamical…