Related papers: Kinematically Lopsided Spiral Galaxies
We study the role of asymptotic curves in supporting the spiral structure of a N-body model simulating a barred spiral galaxy. Chaotic orbits with initial conditions on the unstable asymptotic curves of the main unstable periodic orbits…
The halo masses of nearby individual elliptical galaxies can be estimated by using the kinematics of their stars, planetary nebulae, and globular clusters -- ideally in combination. With currently improving coverage of galaxies of ordinary…
Passive spiral galaxies - unusual galaxies with spiral morphologies but without any sign of on-going star formation - have recently been shown to exist preferentially in cluster infalling regions. This discovery directly connects passive…
The kinematics of the stellar halo hold important clues to the assembly history and mass distribution of the Galaxy. In this study, we map the kinematics of stars across the Galactic halo with the H3 Survey. We find a complex distribution…
We compare and contrast the kinematics of various classes of stars, both normal (with M-K spectral types) and peculiar. Numerous plots show the differences in spatial and velocity distributions as well as distributions in kinetic energy vs.…
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…
We present a 2D kinematic analysis out to ~2-5 effective radii (Re) of 33 massive elliptical galaxies with stellar velocity dispersions larger than 150 km/s. Our observations were taken using the Mitchell Spectrograph (formerly VIRUS-P), a…
Most of the observed and simulated galactic bars are symmetric in the face-on view. However, there are indeed cases of bars that are off-center with respect to the disk or have an asymmetric shape. The only well-known example showing both…
The rotation velocity asymmetry v observed in spiral galaxy HI rotation curves linearly correlates with the effective potential force from the 10 closest neighboring galaxies normalized for the test particle mass and the gravitational…
Water vortices are known to develop polygon structures inside their cores. The apexes of the polygonal manifestations are the result of satellite vortices attached to the parent vortex. Exploiting the analogy between the shallow water…
Passive spiral galaxies -- unusual galaxies with spiral morphology without any sign of on-going star formation -- have recently been discovered to exist preferentially in cluster infalling regions (at about the virial radius, or at a local…
Stellar shells observed in many giant elliptical and lenticular as well as a few spiral and dwarf galaxies presumably result from radial minor mergers of galaxies. We show that the line-of-sight velocity distribution of the shells has a…
Gravitational lensing by a spiral galaxy occurs when the line-of-sight to a background quasar passes within a few kpc from the center of the galactic disk. Since galactic disks are rich in neutral hydrogen, the quasar spectrum will likely…
We study the properties of kinematically disturbed galaxies in the SAMI Galaxy Survey using a quantitative criterion, based on kinemetry (Krajnovic et al.). The approach, similar to the application of kinemetry by Shapiro et al. uses…
Recent observations have shown that star-forming galaxies like our own Milky Way evolve kinematically into ordered thin disks over the last ~8 billion years since z=1.2, undergoing a process of "disk settling." For the first time, we study…
Much of our effort in understanding the long-term evolution and morphology of the Milky Way and other galaxies has focused on the equilibrium of its luminous disk. However, the interplay between all components, seen and unseen, is a major…
Recent results from gravitational lensing are combined with new modeling of the stellar velocity distributions in nearby galaxies to probe the connection between the luminous and the dark matter in elliptical galaxies. From analysing a…
Observations of lopsided spiral galaxies motivated us to explore whether the rapid passage of a companion galaxy could cause them. We examine whether the center of mass of the visible matter becomes displaced from the center of mass of the…
We present a measurement of lopsidedness for the stellar disks of 60 field spiral galaxies in terms of the azimuthal m=1 Fourier amplitude, A_1, of the stellar light. We conjecture that this lopsidedness is caused by tidal interactions and…
In this article I study the distribution of spiral galaxies in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) to investigate whether the universe has an overall handedness. A preference for spiral galaxies in one sector of the sky to be left-handed or…