Related papers: Origin of Radially Increasing Stellar Scaleheight …
We consider the relationship between the total HI mass in late-type galaxies and the kinematic properties of their disks. The mass $M_HI$ for galaxies with a wide variety of properties, from dwarf dIrr galaxies with active star formation to…
We study the self-consistent, linear response of a galactic disc to non-axisymmetric perturbations in the vertical direction as due to a tidal encounter, and show that the density distribution near the disc mid-plane has a strong impact on…
Major mergers or/and the repeated minor mergers lead to dynamical heating of disks of galaxies. We analyze the available data on the velocity dispersion of stellar disks of S-S0 galaxies, including the new observational data obtained at 6m…
Previous analyses of large databases of Milky Way stars have revealed the stellar disk of our Galaxy to be warped and that this imparts a strong signature on the kinematics of stars beyond the solar neighborhood. However, due to the…
This work investigates the vertical profile of the stars in the disk of the Milky Way. The models investigated are of the form $sech^{2/n}(nz/(2H))$ where, setting $\alpha = 2/n$, the three functions of the sequence $\alpha = 0,1,2$…
Until now it has been impossible to observationally measure how star cluster scale height evolves beyond 1Gyr as only small samples have been available. Here we establish a novel method to determine the scale height of a cluster sample…
A galactic disk in a spiral galaxy is generally believed to be embedded in an extended dark matter halo, which dominates its dynamics in the outer parts. However, the shape of the halo is not clearly understood. Here we show that the dark…
We propose a method of distance determination based on the internal structure and dynamics of disk galaxies. The method relies on the universal luminosity profile of a stellar disk represented by an exponential law. Calibrating nearby…
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…
The velocity dispersion of nearby stars in the Galactic disc is well known to increase substantially with age; this is the so-called Age-Velocity relation, and is interpreted as a ``heating'' of the disc as a function of time. We have…
Theories of stellar orbit diffusion in disk galaxies predict different rates of increase of the velocity dispersions parallel and perpendicular to the disk plane, and it is therefore of interest to measure the different velocity dispersion…
We investigate the dependence of the local space density of spiral galaxies on luminosity, scalesize and surface brightness. We derive bivariate space density distributions in these quantities from a sample of about 1000 Sb-Sdm spiral…
We compute the exponential disc scalelength for 686 disc galaxies with spectroscopic redshifts out to redshift 5.8 based on Hubble Space Telescope archival data. We compare the results with our previous measurements based on 30000 nearby…
Observations reveal that mature spiral galaxies consist of stars, gases and plasma approximately distributed in a thin disk of circular shape, usually with a central bulge. The rotation velocities quickly increase from the galactic center…
Based on SDSS DR8, we have selected a sample of 1728 red horizontal branch stars with |Z|<3 kpc by using a color-metallicity relation and stellar parameters. The sample stars clearly trace a typical thick disk population with peaks at…
The formation of galactic discs and the efficiency of star formation within them are issues central to our understanding of galaxy formation. We have developed a detailed and versatile model of disc formation which combines the strengths of…
Neutral hydrogen observations of the nearby, edge-on spiral galaxy NGC 891 reveal the presence of an HI halo extending up to at least 5 kpc from the plane. This halo gas appears to rotate 25 to 100 km/s more slowly than the gas in the…
The spherical gravitational collapse and virialization of arbitrary density fluctuations in an expanding universe is studied. In the context of the standard cosmological model and the peak $ansatz$, disk galaxies are supposed to be the…
We present results of an analysis of the J, H, and K$_s$ 2MASS images of 139 spiral edge-on galaxies selected from the Revised Flat Galaxies Catalog. The basic structural parameters scalelength (h), scaleheight (z_0), and central surface…
Galaxies are observed to obey a strict set of dynamical scaling relations. We review these relations for rotationally supported disk galaxies spanning many decades in mass, surface brightness, and gas content. The behavior of these widely…