Related papers: The Dynamics of Galactic Warps
Galactic disks lie at the heart of many of the most pressing astrophysical puzzles. There are sophisticated kinetic theories that describe some aspects of galaxy disk dynamics, but extracting quantitative predictions from those theories has…
Disk galaxies evolve over time through processes that may rearrange both the radial mass profile and the metallicity distribution within the disk. This review of such slow changes is largely, though not entirely, restricted to…
Recent observations have revealed the structural properties of the dark and luminous mass distribution in spirals. These results led to the vision of a new and amazing scenario. The investigation of single and coadded objects has shown that…
There is strong evidence that the mass in the Universe is dominated by dark matter, which exerts gravitational attraction but whose exact nature is unknown. In particular, all galaxies are believed to be embedded in massive haloes of dark…
The great diversity of extrasolar planetary systems has challenged our understanding of how planets form, and how their orbits evolve as they form. Among the various processes that may account for this diversity, the gravitational…
The surface brightness distribution in the majority of stellar galactic discs falls off exponentially. Often what lies beyond such a stellar disc is the neutral hydrogen gas whose distribution also follows a nearly exponential profile at…
The evolution of the Milky Way disk, which contains most of the stars in the Galaxy, is affected by several phenomena. For example, the bar and the spiral arms of the Milky Way induce radial migration of stars and can trap or scatter stars…
An overview is presented of the main properties of dark matter haloes, as we know them from observations, essentially from rotation curves around spiral and dwarf galaxies. Detailed rotation curves are now known for more than a thousand…
Spiral arms are the defining features of broad morphological classes of disc galaxies, but their nature and influence on galaxy evolution is still under debate. A key diagnostic for their nature is the spiral arm pattern speed: the radial…
We present decompositions of the rotation curves of distant spiral galaxies into contributions due to their bulges, disks, and putative dark haloes. In order to set constraints on the ambiguities of the decompositions we interpret the…
We investigate the gravitational interactions between live stellar disks and their dark matter halos, using LCDM haloes similar in mass to that of the Milky Way taken from the Aquarius Project. We introduce the stellar disks by first…
Recent observations by the Hubble Space Telescope suggest that a strong dynamical and morphological evolution of disk galaxies has occurred in clusters of galaxies. I present the result of the self-consistent high-resolution simulations of…
Deep HI observations of the outer parts of disc galaxies demonstrate the frequent presence of extended, well-developed spiral arms far beyond the optical radius. To understand the nature and the origin of such outer spiral structure, we…
The existence of dark matter in the Galactic disk has been a topic of significant debate, especially over the past two decades. Evidence for dark matter in the disk, a component in addition to the now well-proven dark matter halo, has been…
Evidence for wave-like corrugations are well established in the Milky Way and in nearby disc galaxies. These were originally detected as a displacement of the interstellar medium about the midplane, either in terms of vertical distance or…
Spirals shocks have been widely studied in the context of galactic dynamics and protostellar discs. They may however also play an important role in some classes of close binary stars, and more particularly in cataclysmic variables. In this…
The results of observational studies on the vertical HI density distribution and kinematics of the disks of spiral galaxies are reported and discussed. Attention is drawn to the presence of HI emission, unknown before and here referred to…
A self-gravitating, differentially rotating galactic disc under vertical hydrostatic equilibrium is supported by the vertical pressure gradient force against the gravitational collapse. Such discs are known to support various bending modes…
Correlations between stellar kinematics and chemical abundances are fossil evidence for evolutionary connections between Galactic structural components. Extensive stellar surveys show that the only tolerably clear distinction between…
The spherical gravitational collapse and virialization of arbitrary density fluctuations in an expanding universe is studied. In the context of the standard cosmological model and the peak $ansatz$, disk galaxies are supposed to be the…