Related papers: Minimum Velocity Dispersion in Stable Stellar Disk…
Young protostellar discs are likely to be both self-gravitating, and to support grain growth to sizes where the particles decoupled from the gas. This combination could lead to short-wavelength fragmentation of the solid component in…
Thin, Keplerian accretion disks generically become gravitationally unstable at large radius. I investigate the nonlinear outcome of such instability in cool disks using razor-thin, local, numerical models. Cooling, characterized by a…
We describe the diffusion and random velocities of solid particles due to stochastic forcing by turbulent gas. We include the orbital dynamics of Keplerian disks, both in-plane epicycles and vertical oscillations. We obtain a new result for…
Using radiation hydrodynamics simulations in a local stratified shearing box with realistic equations of state and opacities, we explored the outcome of self-gravity at 50 AU in a protoplanetary disc irradiated by the central star. We found…
We present results of N-body simulations aimed at understanding the dynamics of young stars near the Galactic center. Specifically, we model the inspiral of a cluster core containing an intermediate mass black hole and $N \sim 50$ cluster…
We demonstrate that the chaotic nature of N-body systems can lead to macroscopic variations in the evolution of collisionless simulations containing rotationally supported discs. The unavoidable stochasticity that afflicts all simulations…
To investigate the stability properties of polar disks we performed two-dimensional hydrodynamical simulations for flat polytropic gaseous self-gravitating disks which were perturbed by a central S0-like component. Our disk was constructed…
Star formation depends on the available gaseous "fuel" as well as galactic environment, with higher specific star formation rates where gas is predominantly molecular and where stellar (and dark matter) densities are higher. The partition…
The Nuclear Stellar Disc (NSD) is a flattened high-density stellar structure that dominates the gravitational field of the Milky Way at Galactocentric radius $30\lesssim R\lesssim 300$ pc. We construct axisymmetric self-consistent…
We investigate the evolution of mass density profiles in secular disk galaxy models, paying special attention to the development of a two-component profile from a single initial exponential disk free of cosmological evolution (i.e., no…
In circumstellar disks, the size of dust particles varies from submicron to several centimeters, while planetesimals have sizes of hundreds of kilometers. Therefore, various regimes for the aerodynamic drag between solid bodies and gas can…
In this review, I discuss just three aspects of the stability and evolution of galactic discs. (1) I first review our understanding of the bar instability and how it can be controlled. Disc galaxies in which the orbital speed does not…
N-body simulations were conducted of pairs of galaxies with a 3:1 mass ratio on parabolic orbits, in order to quantify the effect of dynamical friction. The effects of varying the ratio of the dark matter halo size to the distance of…
Planetesimal formation is one of the most important unsolved problems in planet formation theory. In particular, rocky planetesimal formation is difficult because silicate dust grains are easily broken when they collide. Recently, it has…
We perform numerical simulations of solid particle motion in a shearing box model of a protoplanetary disc. The accretion flow is turbulent due to the action of the magnetorotational instability. Aerodynamic drag on the particles is…
Dust at the midplane of a circumstellar disk can become gravitationally unstable and fragment into planetesimals if the local dust-to-gas density ratio mu is sufficiently high. We simulate how dust settles in passive disks and ask how high…
In this fourth article on weighing the Galactic disk using the shape of the phase-space spiral, we have tested our method on a billion particle three-dimensional N-body simulation, comprised of a Milky Way like host galaxy and a merging…
We present results from a detailed dynamical analysis of five high surface brightness, late type spirals, studied with the aim to quantify the luminous-to-dark matter ratio inside their optical radii. The galaxies' stellar light…
Direct collisions between finite-sized particles occur commonly in many areas of astrophysics. Such collisions are typically mediated by chaotic, bound gravitational interactions involving small numbers of particles. An important…
The kinematic dispersions of disc stars can be used to measure the dynamic contributions of baryons to the rotation curves of spiral galaxies and hence to trace the amount and distribution of the remaining dark matter. However, the simple…