Related papers: Stellar Disk Truncations: Where do we stand ?
For the past twenty years, it has been accepted that the vertical scaleheight of the stellar disk in spiral galaxies is constant with radius. However, there is no clear physical explanation for this in the literature. Here we calculate the…
Counterrotating stars in disk galaxies are a puzzling dynamical feature whose origin has been ascribed to either satellite accretion events or to disk instabilities triggered by deviations from axisymmetry. We use a cosmological simulation…
We review current understanding of star formation, outlining an overall theoretical framework and the observations that motivate it. A conception of star formation has emerged in which turbulence plays a dual role, both creating…
We trace the evolution of eight edge-on star-forming disk galaxies by analyzing stellar population properties of their thin and thick disks. These galaxies have relatively low stellar masses (4~$\times$~10$^9$ to…
The impact of stellar multiplicity on the evolution of planet-forming disks is still the subject of debate. Here we present and analyze disk structures around ten multiple stellar systems that were included in an unbiased, high spatial…
This chapter reviews theoretical work on the stellar dynamics of galaxy disks. All the known collective global instabilities are identified, and their mechanisms described in terms of local wave mechanics. A detailed discussion of warps and…
Recent studies have made the community aware of scattered light when examining low-surface-brightness galaxy features such as thick discs. In our past studies of the thick discs of edge-on galaxies in the Spitzer Survey of Stellar Structure…
Our Galaxy is thought to have undergone an active evolutionary history dominated by star formation, the accretion of cold gas, and, in particular, mergers up to 10 gigayear ago. The stellar halo reveals rich fossil evidence of these…
Size is a fundamental parameter for measuring the growth of galaxies and the role of the environment on their evolution. However, the conventional size definitions used for this purpose are often biased and miss the diffuse, outermost…
It is well established that stellar discs are destabilized by sharp features in their phase space, driving recurrent spiral modes. We explore the extent to which surface-density breaks in disc galaxies - which represent sharp changes in the…
Context. Galactic structure studies can be used as a path to constrain the scenario of formation and evolution of our Galaxy. The dependence with the age of stellar population parameters would be linked with the history of star formation…
Bulges are a major galaxy component in the nearby universe, and are one of the primary features that differentiates and defines galaxies. The origin of bulges can be directly probed in part by examining distant galaxies to search for high…
Nuclear Stellar Disks (NSDs), of a few tens to hundreds of parsec across, are a common and yet poorly studied feature of early-type galaxies. Still, such small disks represent a powerful tool to constrain the assembling history of galaxies,…
We present a sample of 950 edge-on spiral galaxies found with the use of an artificial neural network in the Hubble Space Telescope COSMOS field. This is currently the largest sample of distant edge-on galaxies. For all galaxies we analyzed…
With the start of the Gaia era, the time has come to address the major challenge of deriving the star formation history and evolution of the disk of our MilkyWay. Here we review our present knowledge of the outer regions of the Milky Way…
Recent observations have suggested that circumstellar disks may commonly form around young stellar objects. Although the formation of circumstellar disks can be a natural result of the conservation of angular momentum in the parent cloud,…
We describe the use of partially overlapping galaxies to provide direct measurements of the effective absorption in galaxy disks, independent of assumptions about internal disk structure. The non-overlapping parts of the galaxies and…
Observations in the Hubble Deep Fields have been used to study the evolution of galaxy morphology over time. The majority of galaxies with z < 1 are seen to be disk like, whereas most objects with z > 2 appear to be either chaotic or…
Early-type dwarf galaxies are the most common type of galaxies observed in the Universe. The origin of this kind of systems is still not well understood. The aim of this paper is to investigate whether the different locations of dwarf…
We study the kinematics of a local sample of stars, located within a cylinder of 500 pc radius centered on the Sun, in the RAVE dataset. We find clear asymmetries in the $v_R$-$v_\phi$ velocity distributions of thin and thick disk stars:…