Related papers: Formation and Evolution of Disk Galaxies
In these lectures I review observations of star-forming molecular clouds in our Galaxy and nearby galaxies to develop a physical intuition for understanding star formation in the local and high-redshift Universe. A lot of this material is…
Massive stars have a profound influence on the Universe, but their formation remains poorly understood. We review the current status of observational and theoretical research in this field, describing the various stages of an evolutionary…
In order to explain the small scale-lengths detected in the recent deep field observations performed from large ground-based telescopes and from the Hubble Space Telescope, we investigate the predictions at high redshifts for disk galaxies…
The redistribution of stars in galactic disks is an important aspect of disk galaxy evolution. Stars that efficiently migrate in such a way that does not also appreciably heat their orbits can drastically affect the stellar populations…
The currently standard theory of cosmic structure formation posits that the present-day clumpy appearance of the universe developed through gravitational amplification of the matter density fluctuations that are generated in the very early…
The problem of how some disk galaxies avoid forming bars remains unsolved. Many galaxy models having reasonable properties continue to manifest vigorous instabilities that rapidly form strong bars and no widely-accepted idea has yet been…
Formation process(es) of galactic bulges are not yet clarified although several mechanisms have been proposed. In a previous study, we suggested one possibility that galactic bulges have been formed from the cold gas inflowing through…
Recent years have witnessed a substantial increase in our ability to trace the spatially resolved properties of rapidly star-forming galaxies in the high-redshift universe and numerous studies have suggested the importance of turbulent…
This review introduces physical processes in protoplanetary disks relevant to accretion and the initial stages of planet formation. After a brief overview of the observational context, I introduce the elementary theory of disk structure and…
The origin of metal-rich, highly flattened, and rapidly rotating disk globular cluster system in the Galaxy is one of longstanding issues in the context of the Galaxy formation. Our numerical simulations suggest a new ``two-fold'' scenario…
Star clusters and their stellar populations play a significant role in the context of galaxy evolution, across space (from local to high redshift) and time (from currently forming to fossil remnants). We are now within reach of answering a…
Galaxy disk formation must incorporate the multiphase nature of the interstellar medium. The resulting two-phase structure is generated and maintained by gravitational instability and supernova energy input, which yield a source of…
The epoch of galaxy assembly from 2<=z<=4 marks a critical stage during the evolution of today's galaxy population. During this period the star-formation activity in the Universe was at its peak level, and the structural patterns observed…
Ever since a thick disk was proposed to explain the vertical distribution of the Milky Way disk stars, its origin has been a recurrent question. We aim to answer this question by inspecting 19 disk galaxies with stellar mass greater than…
How does the number density of early-type galaxies (E+S0) evolve with redshift? What are their star formation histories? Do their mass density profile and other structural properties evolve with redshift? Answering these questions is key to…
We discuss recent observations of stars located close to the symmetry plane of the Milky Way, and examine them in the context of theories of Galaxy formation and evolution. The kinematics, ages, and compositions of thin disk stars in the…
I review the theory of hierarchical clustering, starting with an historical overview and moving on to a discussion of those aspects of dissipationless clustering under gravity which are most relevant to galaxy formation. I conclude with…
Quantification of the Galaxy's star formation history involves both the duration and the rate of formation, with these parameters being known with different precision for different populations. The early rate of star formation is knowable…
Galactic disks lie at the heart of many of the most pressing astrophysical puzzles. There are sophisticated kinetic theories that describe some aspects of galaxy disk dynamics, but extracting quantitative predictions from those theories has…
We review the observational evidences and the possible theoretical explanations for the abundance gradients in the Galactic disk. In particular, we discuss the implications of abundance gradients and gradients of abundance ratios on the…