Related papers: Density Waves Inside Inner Lindblad Resonance: Nuc…
Spiral-driven instabilities may drive gas inflow to enhance central star formation in disk galaxies. We investigate this hypothesis using the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) in a sample of 2779 nearby unbarred star-forming main-sequence…
Density waves in the central kpc of galaxies, taking the form of spirals, bars and/or lopsided density distributions, are potential actors of the redistribution of angular momentum. They may thus play an important role in the overall…
We present K'(2.1 micron) observations of four nearby flocculent spirals, which clearly show low-level spiral structure and suggest that kiloparsec-scale spiral structure is more prevalent in flocculent spirals than previously supposed. In…
We report the discovery of trailing grand-design nuclear spiral structure in the spiral galaxy NGC 5248. Two tightly-wound red spiral arms, with widths less than 1 arcsec (~75 pc), emanate at 1 arcsec outside the quiescent nucleus of the…
In order to study the location of circumnuclear rings (CNR) and their possible relation with the inner Lindblad resonances (ILR), we investigate a sample of spiral galaxies. For this purpose, we have obtained and analyzed medium resolution…
We have imaged a sample of 45 face-on spiral galaxies in the K-band, to determine the morphology of the old stellar population, which dominates the mass in the disk. The K-band images of the spiral galaxies have been used to calculate…
A deep, fuly sampled diffraction limited (FWHM ~ 70 mas) narrow-band image of the central region in M87 was obtained with the Wide Filed and Planetary Camera 2 of the Hubble Space Telescope using the dithering technique. The H-alpha+[NII]…
Gravitational instabilities can drive small-scale turbulence and large-scale spiral arms in massive gaseous disks under conditions of slow radiative cooling. These motions affect the observed disk morphology, its mass accretion rate and…
The results of numerical simulations of a gaseous disk in the potential of a stellar spiral density wave are presented. The conditions under which straightened spiral arm segments (rows) form in the gas component are studied. These features…
Star formation is enhanced in spiral arms because of a combination of orbit crowding, cloud collisions, and gravitational instabilities. The characteristic mass for the instability is 10^7 Msun in gas and 10^5 Msun in stars, and the…
I discuss new observations of circumnuclear regions in barred galaxies, both of their kinematics and their near-infrared (NIR) morphology. New kinematic observations of M100 confirm that (1) the inner bar-like feature detected before in…
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…
The presence of nuclear discs in barred disc galaxies has been demonstrated in studies on stellar structures and kinematics. It is thus imperative to establish their fundamental properties and scaling relations, which can help understanding…
We summarize some recent results from our observational campaign to study the central regions of spiral galaxies of late Hubble type (Scd - Sm). These disk-dominated, bulgeless galaxies have an apparently uneventful merger history. The…
An N-body hybrid simulation, integrating both massive and tracer particles, of a Galactic disk is used to study the stellar phase space distribution or velocity distributions in different local neighborhoods. Pattern speeds identified in…
New optical and NIR K-band images of the inner 3 kpc region of the nearby Virgo spiral M100 (NGC 4321) display remarkable morphological changes with wavelength. While in the optical the light is dominated by a circumnuclear zone of enhanced…
We propose a theory to explain the formation of both spirals and rings in barred galaxies using a common dynamical framework. It is based on the orbital motion driven by the unstable equilibrium points of the rotating bar potential. Thus,…
After a short review of the principal theories of spiral structure in galaxies, I describe two new developments. First, it now seems clear that linear theory cannot yield a full description for the development of spiral patterns because…
The dynamics of the inner disk of many galaxies is dominated by bars. As a result, resonances between the bar and the disk become an important factor. In order to detect resonances, we measure angular and radial frequencies of individual…
We develop diagnostics based on gas kinematics to identify the presence of a bar in an edge-on spiral galaxy and determine its orientation. We use position-velocity diagrams (PVDs) obtained by projecting edge-on two-dimensional…