Related papers: The Evolving Structure of Galactic Disks
The Milky Way has distinct structural stellar components linked to its formation and subsequent evolution, but disentangling them is nontrivial. With the recent availability of high-quality data for a large numbers of stars in the Milky…
Observations indicate that much of the interstellar gas in merging galaxies may settle into extended gaseous disks. Here, I present simulations of disk formation in mergers of gas-rich galaxies. Up to half of the total gas settles into…
I review the general progress made in the study of galaxy evolution concentrating on the impact of systematic ground-based spectroscopic surveys of faint galaxies and high resolution imaging with Hubble Space Telescope. The picture emerging…
We analyze the present-day structure and assembly history of a high resolution hydrodynamic simulation of the formation of a Milky Way (MW)-like disk galaxy, from the "Eris" simulation suite, dissecting it into cohorts of stars formed at…
To break the degeneracy among galactic stellar components, we extract kinematic structures using the framework described in Du et al. (2019, 2020). For example, the concept of stellar halos is generalized to weakly-rotating structures that…
In this review I demonstrate that a realistic model for the formation of galaxy disks depends on a proper treatment of the gas in galaxies. Historically, cosmological simulations of disk galaxy formation have suffered from a lack of…
More than half of nearby disc galaxies have pseudobulges instead of classical bulges that are though to be end-products of galaxy mergers. Pseudobulges are presumed to develop overtime as a result of secular evolution of galaxy discs. We…
The increasing abundance of passive "red-sequence" galaxies since z=1-2 is mirrored by a coincident rise in the number of galaxies with spheroidal morphologies. In this paper, however, we show that in detail the correspondence between…
How large disk galaxies have evolved in, and out of, the blue cloud of actively star-forming galaxies as a function of environment and time is an outstanding question. Some of the largest disks become systems like M31, M33 and the Milky Way…
Observational and theoretical evidence that internal, slow ("secular") evolution reshapes galaxy disks is reviewed in Kormendy & Kennicutt (2004, ARAA, 42, 603). This update has three aims. First, I emphasize that this evolution is very…
We analyze the global structure of 34 late-type, edge-on, undisturbed, disk galaxies spanning a wide range of mass. We measure structural parameters for the galaxies using two-dimensional least-squares fitting to our $R$-band photometry.…
The Milky Way serves as a template for understanding the formation and evolution of late-type massive disk galaxies since we can obtain detailed chemical and kinematic information for large samples of individual stars. However, the early…
Thick disks are a prevalent feature observed in numerous disk galaxies including our own Milky Way. Their significance has been reported to vary widely, ranging from a few to 100% of the disk mass, depending on the galaxy and the…
The high abundance of disc galaxies without a large central bulge challenges predictions of current hydrodynamic simulations of galaxy formation. We aim to shed light on the formation of these objects by studying the redshift and mass…
As they grow, galaxies can transition from irregular/spheroidal with 'bursty' star formation histories (SFHs), to disky with smooth SFHs. But even in simulations, the direct physical cause of such transitions remains unclear. We therefore…
The formation and evolution of disk galaxies in the cosmological context is studied. We consider the observable properties of disk galaxies and treat the disk formation and galactic evolutionary processes in a self-consistent fashion. We…
To investigate the formation and evolution of vertical structures in disk galaxies, we measure global $\operatorname{sech}^2$ scale heights, averaging thin and thick components when present, for 2631 edge-on disk galaxies with $M_*>10^{10}…
Galaxy evolution is in transition from an early universe dominated by hierarchical clustering to a future dominated by secular processes. These result from interactions involving collective phenomena such as bars, oval disks, spiral…
We performed numerical simulations of mergers between gas-rich disc galaxies, which result in the formation of late-type galaxies. Stars formed during the merger end up in a thick disc that is partially supported by velocity dispersion and…
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…