Related papers: Star Formation in Polar-Ring Galaxies

Massive stars influence the surrounding universe far out of proportion to their numbers through ionizing radiation, supernova explosions, and heavy element production. Their formation requires the collapse of massive interstellar gas clouds…

All circumbinary planets currently detected are in orbits that are almost coplanar to the binary orbit. While misaligned circumbinary planets are more difficult to detect, observations of polar aligned circumbinary gas and debris disks…

We have obtained HST_NICMOS images for 72 nearby spiral galaxy bulges in the H-band. These data show that galaxies with regular bulges have steeper nuclear cusps than galaxies with irregular bulges. We also show that galaxies with regular…

Dense stellar environments as hosts of ongoing star formation increase the probability of gravitational encounters among stellar systems during the early stages of evolution. Stellar interaction may occur through non-recurring, hyperbolic…

Wolf-Rayet (WR) HII galaxies are local metal-poor star-forming galaxies, observed when the most massive stars are evolving from O stars to WR stars, making them template systems to study distant starbursts. We have been performing a program…

The Milky Way contains several distinct old stellar components that provide a fossil record of its formation. We can understand their spatial distribution and kinematics in a hierarchical formation scenario by associating the proto-galactic…

When observed with sufficiently high spatial resolution and sensitivity, star formation regions are unusually complex X-ray sources. Low-mass protostars and T Tauri stars, Herbig Ae/Be stars, OB and Wolf-Rayet stars are seen at levels $28…

Spiral galaxies have most of their stellar mass in a large rotating disk, and only a modest fraction in a central spheroidal bulge. This poses a major challenge for cosmological models of galaxy formation. Galaxies form at the centre of…

How do stars manage to form within low-density, HI-dominated gas? Such environments provide a laboratory for studying star formation with physical conditions distinct from starbursts and the metal-rich disks of spiral galaxies where most…

The majority of stars in the Galactic field and halo are part of binary or multiple systems. A significant fraction of these systems have orbital separations in excess of thousands of astronomical units, and systems wider than a parsec have…

We report high quality near-infrared spectroscopy of 12 ultra-luminous infrared galaxy mergers (ULIRGs). Our new VLT and Keck data provide ~0.5" resolution, stellar and gas kinematics of these galaxies most of which are compact systems in…

We analyze the statistical properties of the circumnuclear HII regions of a sample of 52 nearby galaxies ($v < 1000km/s) from archival HST/NICMOS H-band and Pa alpha (1.87micron) observations at unprecedented spatial resolutions of between…

[Abridged] Over the past two decades observations and theoretical simulations have established a global frame-work of galaxy formation and evolution in the young Universe. Galaxies formed as baryonic gas cooled at the centres of collapsing…

Rings in S0s are enigmatic features which can however betray the evolutionary paths of particular galaxies. We have undertaken long-slit spectroscopy of five lenticular galaxies with UV-bright outer rings. The observations have been made…

Using analytic modeling and simulations, we address the origin of an abundance of star-forming, clumpy, extended gas rings about massive central bodies in massive galaxies at $z \!<\! 4$. Rings form by high-angular-momentum streams and…

Star-forming blue early-type galaxies at low redshift can give insight to the stellar mass growth of L$*$ elliptical galaxies in the local Universe. We wish to understand the reason for star formation in these otherwise passively evolving…

Utilizing ALFALFA HI data, we investigate the relationship between specific star formation rate (sSFR) and halo spin across various star-forming galaxies. Our analysis reveals weak yet statistically significant positive correlation between…

Globular cluster (GC) systems have now been studied in galaxies ranging from dwarfs to giants and spanning the full Hubble sequence of morphological types. Imaging and spectroscopy with the Hubble Space Telescope and large ground-based…

We present new mm interferometric and optical integral-field unit (IFU) observations and construct a sample of 12 E and S0 galaxies with molecular gas which have both CO and optical maps. The galaxies contain 2 x 10^7 to 5 x 10^9 M\odot of…

Tidal Dwarf Galaxies (TDGs) are objects presently forming from gas which has been expelled from their parent galaxies during an interaction. We observed the CO emission of a sample of 11 TDGs, of which 8 were detected. The CO is found at…