Related papers: Long-Lived Double-Barred Galaxies From Pseudo-Bulg…
Several recent studies indicate that bulges are more complex than merely structureless relaxed stellar systems. We study the HST images of a sample of 130 nearby early type (S0-Sab) disc galaxies and detect pure structureless bulges with…
It is widely accepted that within the framework of LCDM a significant fraction of giant-disk galaxies has recently experienced a violent galactic merger. We present numerical simulations of such major mergers of gas-rich pure disk galaxies,…
Recent observations of high-redshift galaxies ($z \lesssim 7$) reveal that a substantial fraction have turbulent, gas-rich disks with well-ordered rotation and elevated levels of star formation. In some instances, disks show evidence of…
We present a study of barred galaxies in the cluster environment, exploiting a sample of galaxies drawn from the extended WIde-field Nearby Galaxy-cluster Survey (OmegaWINGS) that covers up to the outer regions of 32 local X-ray selected…
Spiral arms that emerge from the ends of a galactic bar are important in interpreting observations of our and external galaxies. It is therefore important to understand the physical mechanism that causes them. We find that these spiral arms…
Bar driven secular evolution plays a key role in changing the morphology and kinematics of disk galaxies, leading to the formation of rapidly rotating boxy/peanut bulges. If these disk galaxies also hosted a preexisting classical bulge, how…
Bars in galaxies may develop through a global instability or due to an interaction with another system. We study bar formation in disky dwarf galaxies orbiting a Milky Way-like galaxy. We employ $N$-body simulations to study the impact of…
The formation of two stellar bars within a galaxy has proved challenging for numerical studies. It is yet not clear whether the inner bar is born via a star formation process promoted by gas inflow along the outer bar, or whether it is…
We review general observational properties of bars in galaxies, and relations between bars, their dynamics, and (circum)nuclear activity. We consider new measurements of bar fractions and of the distribution of bars with host type, bar…
A substantial fraction of barred galaxies host additional nuclear bars which tumble with pattern speeds exceeding those of the large-scale (primary) stellar bars. We have investigated the mechanism of formation and dynamical decoupling in…
(Abridge) Bars are very common in the centre of the disc galaxies, and they drive the evolution of their structure. A volume-limited sample of 2106 disc galaxies extracted from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey Data Release 5 was studied to…
Galactic bars can form via the internal bar instability or external tidal perturbations by other galaxies. We systematically compare the properties of bars formed through the two mechanisms with a series of controlled $N$-body simulations…
In this series of papers, we propose a theory to explain the formation and properties of rings and spirals in barred galaxies. The building blocks of these structures are orbits guided by the manifolds emanating from the unstable Lagrangian…
In this paper we present building blocks which can explain the formation and properties both of spirals and of inner and outer rings in barred galaxies. We first briefly summarise the main results of the full theoretical description we have…
We have performed a multi-transition CO study of the centers of seven double-barred galaxies that exhibit a variety of molecular gas morphologies to determine if the molecular gas properties are correlated with the nuclear morphology and…
Close examination of so-called "pseudobulges" in several early-type disk galaxies indicates that they are actually composite structures consisting of both a flattened, kinematically cool disklike structure ("disky pseudobulge") and a…
We present an analysis of the molecular gas distributions in the 29 barred and 15 unbarred spirals in BIMA SONG. For CO-bright galaxies, we confirm the conclusion by Sakamoto et al. (1999b) that barred spirals have higher molecular gas…
I discuss several aspects of secular evolution linked to bars and to boxy/peanut bulges, based on a very large number of high resolution, fully self-consistent $N$-body simulations. When the bar forms, it is as thin as the disc. Its…
In the cold dark matter (CDM) paradigm, bulges easily form through galaxy mergers, either major or minor, or through clumpy disks in the early universe, where clumps are driven to the center by dynamical friction. Also pseudo-bulges, with a…
The oxygen (O/H) and N/O abundance ratios along the bar of 16 barred spiral starburst galaxies are determined using long-slit spectroscopy. The abundance gradients and the spatial distribution of the ionized gas along the bar are used to…