Related papers: Simulations of the heating of the Galactic stellar…
We perform a series of controlled N-body simulations of growing disc galaxies within non-growing, live dark matter haloes of varying mass and concentration. Our initial conditions include either a low-mass disc or a compact bulge. New…
We analyse the heating of stellar discs by non axisymmetric structures and giant molecular clouds (GMCs) in N-body simulations of growing disc galaxies. The analysis resolves long-standing discrepancies between models and data by…
We present the analysis of a suite of simulations run with different particle-and grid-based cosmological hydrodynamical codes and compare them with observational data of the Milky Way. This is the first study to make comparisons of…
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…
We develop an analytic model to calculate the rate at which galaxy disks are heated by dark matter substructures orbiting in their halos. The model takes into account the internal structure, mass function and accretion rate of satellites…
The velocity dispersion of stars in the solar neighbourhood thin disc increases with time after star formation. Nordstrom et al. (2004) is the most recent observational attempt to constrain the age-velocity dispersion relation. They fitted…
Could the velocity spread, increasing with time, in the Galactic disk be explained as a result of gravitational interactions of stars with giant molecular clouds (GMCs) and spiral arms? Do the old open clusters high above the Galactic plane…
Vertically extended, high velocity dispersion stellar distributions appear to be a ubiquitous feature of disc galaxies, and both internal and external mechanisms have been proposed to be the major driver of their formation. However, it is…
We use idealized N-body simulations of equilibrium stellar disks embedded within course-grained dark matter haloes to study the effects of spurious collisional heating on disk structure and kinematics. Collisional heating artificially…
Fuzzy dark matter (FDM), an attractive dark matter candidate comprising ultralight bosons (axions) with a particle mass $m_a\sim10^{-22}$ eV, is motivated by the small-scale challenges of cold dark matter and features a kpc-size de Broglie…
Context. The scale height of the spatial distribution of open clusters (OCs) in the Milky Way exhibits a well known increase with age which is usually interpreted as evidence for dynamical heating of the disc or of the disc having been…
The growth and properties of galaxies are thought to be closely connected to the ones of their host dark matter halos. Despite the importance of this so-called galaxy-halo connection, the potential role of dark matter halos in regulating…
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…
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…
We use a suite of idealised N-body simulations to study the impact of spurious heating of star particles by dark matter particles on the kinematics and morphology of simulated galactic discs. We find that spurious collisional heating leads…
In the solar-neighbourhood, older stars have larger random velocities than younger ones. It is argued that the increase in velocity dispersion with time is predominantly a gradual process rather than one induced by discrete events such as…
Within a cosmological hydrodynamical simulation, we form a disc galaxy with sub- components which can be assigned to a thin stellar disc, thick disk, and a low mass stellar halo via a chemical decomposition. The thin and thick disc…
We explore the heating of the velocity distribution in the solar neighbourhood by stochastic spiral waves. Our investigation is based on direct numerical integration of initially circular test-particle orbits in the sheared sheet. We…
Deep photometric surveys of the Milky Way have revealed diffuse structures encircling our Galaxy far beyond the "classical" limits of the stellar disk. This paper reviews results from our own and other observational programs, which together…
Motivated by the presence of numerous dark matter clumps in the Milky Way's halo as expected from the cold dark matter cosmological model, we conduct numerical simulations to examine the heating of the disk. We construct an initial galaxy…