Related papers: Stellar Disk Truncations: Where do we stand ?
High spatial and spectral resolution observations of star formation and kinematics in early galaxies have shown that two-thirds are massive rotating disk galaxies with the remainder being less massive non-rotating objects. The line of sight…
The formation of thick stellar disks in spiral galaxies is studied. Simulations of gas-rich young galaxies show formation of internal clumps by gravitational instabilities, clump coalescence into a bulge, and disk thickening by strong…
A detailed understanding of the physics of star and planet formation requires study of individual objects as well as statistical assessment of global properties and evolutionary trends. Observational investigations of circumstellar material…
This is the first paper presenting our long-term project aimed at studying the nature of bulges through the analysis of their stellar population gradients. We present deep spectroscopic observations along the minor axis and the data…
Spiral galaxies offer a unique opportunity to study the role of star formation in galaxy evolution and to test various theoretical star formation schemes. I review some recent relevant work on the evolution of spiral galaxies. Detailed…
Recent observations have revealed that red, optically--passive spiral galaxies with little or no optical emission lines, harbour significant amounts of dust-obscured star formation. We propose that these observational results can be…
Understanding galaxy evolution is key to explaining the structures we observe in the present-day Universe. Counterrotating stellar disks (CRDs), i.e. co-spatial stellar disks rotating with opposite angular momentum, have been proposed as…
Circumstellar disks are an integral part of the star formation process and the sites where planets are formed. Understanding the physical processes that drive their evolution, as disks evolve from optically thick to optically thin, is…
The presence of a well-defined and narrow dust lane in an edge-on spiral galaxy is the observational signature of a thin and dense molecular disk, in which gravitational collapse has overcome turbulence. Using a sample of galaxies out to…
Due to longer dynamical timescales, the outskirts of early-type galaxies retain the footprint of their formation and assembly. Under the popular two-phase galaxy formation scenario, an initial in-situ phase of star formation is followed by…
Galaxies represent the visible fabric of the Universe and there has been considerable progress recently in both observational and theoretical studies. The underlying goal is to understand the present-day diversity of galaxy forms, masses…
The imaging of disks around young stars presents extreme challenges in high dynamic range, angular resolution, and sensitivity. Recent instrumental advances have met these challenges admirably, leading to a marked increase in imaging…
The expectation that aerodynamic drag will force the solids in a gas-rich protoplanetary disk to spiral in toward the host star on short timescales is one of the fundamental problems in planet formation theory. The nominal efficiency of…
We have explored radial color and stellar surface mass density profiles for a sample of 85 late-type spiral galaxies with deep (down to ~27 mag arcsec^-2) SDSS g'- and r'-band surface brightness profiles. About 90% of the light profiles…
A significant fraction of nearby late-type galaxies are lopsided. We study the asymmetry of the stellar component in a sample of well-resolved disky galaxies selected from the last snapshot of the Illustris TNG100 simulation based on their…
Recent ideas for the origin and persistence of the warps commonly observed in disc galaxies have focused on cosmic infall. We present N-body simulations of an idealized form of cosmic infall onto a disc galaxy and obtain a warp that closely…
Stars in disks of spiral galaxies are usually assumed to remain roughly at their birth radii. This assumption is built into decades of modelling of the evolution of stellar populations in our own Galaxy and in external systems. We present…
We present a catalog of true edge-on disk galaxies automatically selected from the Seventh Data Release (DR7) of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. A visual inspection of the $g$, $r$ and $i$ images of about 15000 galaxies allowed us to split…
Giant low surface brightness galaxies (gLSBGs) with dynamically cold stellar discs reaching the radius of 130 kpc challenge currently considered galaxy formation mechanisms. We analyse new deep long-slit optical spectroscopic observations,…
The recent identification of one or two sub-parsec disks of young, massive stars orbiting the ~4e6 solar mass black hole Sgr A* has prompted an "in-situ" scenario for star formation in disks of gas formed from a cloud captured from the…