Related papers: Dynamical Processes in the Central Kpc and Active …
New observations in favour of a significant role of secular evolution are reviewed: central star formation boosted in pseudo-bulge barred galaxies, relations between bulge and disk, evidence for rejuvenated bulges. Numerical simulations…
Recent progress in the understanding of the role of bars and gravitational instabilities in galaxy disks is reviewed. It has been proposed that bars can produce mass transfer towards the center, and progressively metamorphose late-type…
The dynamics of galactic nuclei reflects the presence of supermassive black holes (SBHs) in many ways. Single SBHs act as sinks, destroying a mass in stars equal to their own mass in roughly one relaxation time and forcing nuclei to expand.…
(Abridged) We present a detailed study of the relation between circumnuclear dust morphology, host galaxy properties, and nuclear activity in nearby galaxies. We use our sample of 123 nearby galaxies with visible--near-infrared colormaps…
We present direct kinematic evidence for bar streaming motions in two active galaxies with boxy stellar bulges. The Hawaii Imaging Fabry-Perot Interferometer was used on the Canada-France-Hawaii 3.6-m telescope and the University of Hawaii…
One important question in active galactic nucleus (AGN) is how gas is brought down to the galaxy center. Both internal secular evolution (torque induced by non-axisymmetric galactic structures such as bars) and external processes (e.g.…
Galaxy-galaxy interactions and large scale galaxy bars are usually considered as the two main mechanisms for driving gas to the centres of galaxies. By using large samples of galaxy pairs and visually classified bars from the Sloan Digital…
Galactic bars are unstable to a vertical buckling instability which heats the disk and in some cases forms a boxy/peanut shaped bulge. We analyze the buckling instability as an application of classical Euler buckling followed by nonlinear…
The regular or chaotic dynamics of an analytical realistic three dimensional model composed of a spherically symmetric central nucleus, a bar and a flat disk is investigated. For describing the properties of the bar we introduce a new…
Nuclear star clusters that surround supermassive black holes (SMBHs) in galactic nuclei are thought to contain large numbers of black holes (BHs) and neutron stars (NSs), a fraction of which form binaries and could merge by Kozai-Lidov…
Within the NUclei of GAlaxies project we have obtained IRAM PdBI and 30m 12CO(1-0) and 12CO(2-1) observations of the spiral galaxy NGC 6951. Previous work shows that there is indirect evidence of gas inflow from 3 kpc down to small radii: a…
A significant fraction of nearby galaxies show evidence of weak nuclear activity unrelated to normal stellar processes. Recent high-resolution, multiwavelength observations indicate that the bulk of this activity derives from black hole…
We review our recent work on the formation and evolution of disks with in triaxial dark matter (DM) halos by means of numerical simulations, including star formation and feedback from stellar evolution. The growing disks are strongly in…
The subject of the paper is the role of the massive stellar cluster in the activity phenomenon and in the structure of active galactic nuclei. We introduce a simple model of stellar dynamics in the internal part of the cluster, which allows…
Secular evolution gradually shapes galaxies by internal processes, in contrast to early cosmological evolution which is more rapid. An important driver of secular evolution is the flow of gas from the disk into the central regions, often…
Recent molecular line observations with ALMA in several nearby Seyferts have revealed the existence of molecular tori, and the nature of gas flows at 10-20~pc scale. At 100~pc scale, or kpc-scale, previous NOEMA work on gravitational…
We study dynamics of bars in models of disk galaxies embeded in realistic dark matter halos. We find that disk thickness plays an important, if not dominant, role in the evolution and structure of the bars. We also make extensive numerical…
I discuss four key questions about Galactic Center dynamics, their implications for understanding both the environment of the Galactic MBH and galactic nuclei in general, and the progress made in addressing them. The questions are (1) Is…
Galaxy mergers play a crucial role in the formation of massive galaxies and the buildup of their bulges. An important aspect of the merging process is the in-spiral of the supermassive black-holes (SMBHs) to the centre of the merger remnant…
Galactic bars can drive cold gas inflows towards the centres of galaxies. The gas transport happens primarily through the so-called bar ``dust lanes'', which connect the galactic disc at kpc scales to the nuclear rings at hundreds of pc…