Related papers: The Galactic Bar
The Milky Way has a barred bulge. This article summarizes the current understanding of the main structural parameters and pattern speed of the bar, and compares predicted values for the microlensing optical depth with the bulge microlensing…
Like the majority of spiral galaxies, the Milky Way contains a central non-axisymmetric bar component. Our position in the Galactic plane renders it rather hard to see, but also allows us to make measurements of the bar that are completely…
The now substantial evidence for a rotating bar in the inner Galaxy and its dynamical implications are reviewed.
A self-consistent stellar dynamical model for the Galactic bar is constructed from about 500 numerically computed orbits with an extension of the Schwarzschild technique. The model fits the {\sl COBE} found asymmetric boxy light…
Evidence from a variety of sources points towards the existence of a bar in the central few kpc of the Galaxy. The measurements roughly agree on the direction of the bar major axis, but other parameters (axis ratio, size, pattern speed) are…
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…
Evidence for a bar at the center of the Milky Way triggered a renewed enthusiasm for dynamical modelling of the Galactic bar-bulge. Our goal is to compare the kinematics of a sample of tracers, planetary nebulae, widely distributed over the…
The Milky Way's bar dominates the orbits of stars and the flow of cold gas in the inner Galaxy, and is therefore of major importance for Milky Way dynamical studies in the Gaia era. Here we discuss the pronounced peanut shape of the…
Until recently our knowledge of the Galactic Bulge stellar populations was based on the study of a few low extinction windows. Large photometric and spectroscopic surveys are now underway to map large areas of the bulge. They probe several…
Our Galaxy is a barred spiral. Recent work based on the COBE NIR data implies a small bulge-bar and a disk with a short scale-length. The corotation radius of the bar is in the range 3-4.5 kpc. The stellar density distribution beyond the…
A new picture accounting for the dominant features in the observed l-V distribution of the Milky Way gas within the central few kpcs is proposed, based on symmetry-free and high resolution 3D N-body and SPH simulations.
We present an analytic model of the stellar mass distribution of the Milky Way bar. The model is obtained by fitting a multi-component parametric density distribution to a made-to-measure N-body model of Portail et al., constructed to match…
We review the observational evidences concerning the three-dimensional structure of the Galactic bulge. Although the inner few kpc of our Galaxy are normally referred to as {\it the bulge}, all the observations demonstrate that this region…
Several mechanisms of bar formation in stellar galactic disks are considered, including Toomre swing amplification and normal mode approach. On example of the well-known model of Kuzmin--Toomre using N-body simulations it was shown that the…
I review both well established and more recent findings on the properties of bars, and their host galaxies, stemming from photometric and spectroscopic observations, and discuss how these findings can be understood in terms of a global…
I selectively review the various dynamical scenarios that have been explored to date, especially those that illustrate the conundrums. In short, although the existence of asymmetries are convincing enough, the interpretation remains…
I discuss evidences for bar-driven gas fueling in the central regions of galaxies, focusing on scales down to about 10 pc. I thus mention the building of inner disks, and the link with resonances, as well as the corresponding kinematic…
The disks of galaxies are primarily stellar systems, and fundamentally dynamical entities. Thus, to fully understand galactic disks, we must study their stellar kinematics as well as their morphologies. Observational techniques have now…
With the steady increase of the sample size of observed microlenses towards the central regions of the Galaxy, the main source of the uncertainty in the lens mass will shift from the simple Poisson noise to the intrinsic non-uniqueness of…
I briefly report on the work conducted to probe the gravitational potential of active and non-active disk galaxies using two-dimensional gas and stellar kinematics, first emphasizing the need to make a distinction between ''fuelling the…