Related papers: Secular Evolution of the Galactic Disk
In a cosmological setting, the disc of a galaxy is expected to continuously experience gravitational torques and perturbations from a variety of sources, which can cause the disc to wobble, flare and warp. Specifically, the study of…
Spiral shocks are potentially a major source of turbulence in the interstellar medium. To address this problem quantitatively, we use numerical simulations to investigate gas flow across spiral arms in vertically stratified,…
Studying star formation in spiral arms tells us not only about the evolution of star formation, and molecular clouds, but can also tell us about the nature of spiral structure in galaxies. I will address both these topics using the results…
So far, six mechanisms have been proposed to account for the Galactic disk heating. Of these, the most important appear to be a combination of scattering of stars by molecular clouds and by spiral arms. We study a further mechanism, namely,…
A star in the Milky Way's disk can now be at a Galactocentric radius quite distant from its birth radius for two reasons: either its orbit has become eccentric through radial heating, which increases its radial action $J_R$ (`blurring'); or…
Bars and spiral arms have played an important role as constraints on the dynamics and on the distribution of dark matter in the optical parts of disk galaxies. Dynamics linked to the dissipative nature of gas, and its transformation into…
The extreme flatness of stellar discs in superthin galaxies is puzzling and the apparent dearth of these objects in cosmological simulation poses challenging problem to the standard cold dark matter paradigm. Irrespective of mergers or…
We study the radial migration of stars driven by recurring multi-arm spiral features in an exponential disk embedded in a dark matter halo. The spiral perturbations redistribute angular momentum within the disk and lead to substantial…
Galaxy disks are characterised by star formation histories that vary systematically along the Hubble sequence. We study global star formation, incorporating supernova feedback, gas accretion and enriched outflows in disks modelled by a…
Spiral arms are the defining features of broad morphological classes of disc galaxies, but their nature and influence on galaxy evolution is still under debate. A key diagnostic for their nature is the spiral arm pattern speed: the radial…
It is found that a previously thought-to-be well established result of density wave theory, that there is no interaction between a quasi-stationary spiral density wave and the basic state (i.e. the axisymmetric part) of the galactic disk,…
Galaxy evolution is in transition from an early universe dominated by hierarchical clustering to a future dominated by secular processes. These result from interactions involving collective phenomena such as bars, oval disks, spiral…
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…
The Galactic center of the Milky-Way harbors a massive black hole (BH) orbited by a diverse population of young and old stars. A significant fraction of the youngest stars ($\sim4-7$ Myr) reside in a thin stellar disk with puzzling…
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…
A model of a galactic disk is presented which extends the homogeneous one zone models by incorporating propagation of material and energy in the disk. For reasonable values of the parameters the homogeneous steady state is unstable to the…
It is now a well established fact that galaxies undergo significant morphological transformation during their lifetimes, manifesting as an evolution along the Hubble sequence from the late to the early Hubble types. The physical processes…
Galactic spiral shocks are dominant morphological features and believed to be responsible for substructure formation within spiral arms in disk galaxies. They can also contribute a substantial amount of kinetic energy to the interstellar…
The rate of internally-driven evolution of galaxy discs is strongly affected by the lifetimes of the spiral patterns they support. Evolution is much faster if the spiral patterns are recurrent short-lived transients rather than long-lived,…
Average stellar orbits of the Galactic disk may have some small intrinsic ellipticity which breaks the exact axisymmetry and there may also be some migration of stars inwards or outwards. Both phenomena can be detected through kinematic…