The Secular Evolution of Disk Structural Parameters

By V. Debattista, Lucio Mayer, C. Carollo, B. Moore, James Wadsley, T. H. M. F. Astronomie, Eth Zurich Astronomy Department, U. D. O. Physics, Astronomy, M. University. 2005

356 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We present a comprehensive series of simulations to study the secular evolution of disk galaxies expected in a ΛCDM universe. Our simulations are organized in a hierarchy of increasing complexity, ranging from rigid-halo collisionless simulations to fully live simulations with gas and star formation. Our goal is to examine which structural properties of disk galaxies may result from secular evolution rather than from hierarchical assembly. In the vertical direction, we find that various mechanisms lead to heating, the strongest of which is the buckling instability of a bar, which leads to peanut-shaped bulges; these can be recognized face-on even in the presence of gas. We find that bars are robust structures that survive buckling and require a large (~20% of the total mass of the disk) central mass concentration to be destroyed. This can occur in dissipative simulations, where bars induce strong gas inflows, but requires that radiative cooling overcome heating. We show how angular momentum redistribution leads to increasing central densities and disk scale lengths and to profile breaks at large radii. The breaks in these simulations are in excellent agreement with observations, even when the evolution is collisionless. Disk scale lengths increase even when the total disk angular momentum is conserved; thus, mapping halo angular momenta to scale lengths is nontrivial. A decomposition of the resulting profile into a bulge+disk gives structural parameters in reasonable agreement with observations although kinematics betrays their bar nature. These findings have important implications for galaxy formation models, which have so far ignored or introduced in a very simplified way the effects of nonaxisymmetric instabilities on the morphological evolution of disk galaxies.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/47c0ce9f63faf0b315a865817d58d321b54498e2

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Citations in the corpus

The ATLAS3D project – III. A census of the stellar angular momentum within the effective radius of early‐type galaxies: unveiling the distribution of fast and slow rotators (2011, background): “Subsequent evolution due to disc instabilities, spiral density waves and bars, will tend to heat the stellar component (Sellwood & Binney 2002; Debattista et al. 2006; Sales et al. 2009; Minchev & Famaey 2010) and decrease λR accordingly, but the global stellar angular momentum of FRs should not…”
Red Clump Stars from LAMOST II: the outer disc of the Milky Way (2017, background): “Simulations show that secular evolution of the discs can significantly alter their properties, from the age distribution to the stellar density profile of the outer disc (Roškar et al. 2008; Debattista et al. 2006).”
Evolution of galactic discs: multiple patterns, radial migration, and disc outskirts (2012, background): “Debattista et al. (2006) related the occurrence of Type II profiles in barred N-body discs to the bar strength.”
MERGERS AND BULGE FORMATION IN ΛCDM: WHICH MERGERS MATTER? (2009, background): “However, this is not to say that secular processes cannot, in principle, build some massive bulges (see e.g. Debattista et al. 2004, 2006).”
A Revised Model for the Formation of Disk Galaxies: Low Spin and Dark Halo Expansion (2006, background): “Indeed, such an angular momentum transfer is observed in numerical simulations (e.g., Hohl 1971; Debattista et al. 2006).”
Photometric scaling relations of lenticular and spiral galaxies (2010, background): “…the central regions of the galaxies is expected (Athanassoula & Misioritis 2002), leading to central star formation, thus adding to the mass of the bulge over a timescale of 1-2 Gyrs (Athanassoula Lambert & Dehnen 2005; Bournaud, Combes & Semelin 2005; Debattista et al. 2006; Sarzi et al. 2007).”
Properties of Bars and Bulges in the Hubble Sequence (2007, background): “…& Misioritis 2002; Athanassoula 2002, 2003, 2005a,b; O’Neilss & Dubinski 2003; Debattista et al. 2004; Martinez-Valpuesta, Shlosman & Heller 2004; Debattista et al. 2006; Martinez-Valpuesta, Shlosman & Heller 2006), where the orbital families of bars are changed in such a manner that leads to a…”
Mapping the Milky Way with LAMOST– III. Complicated spatial structure in the outer disc (2018, background): “In principle, the shape of the radial profile may be used to probe the secular evolution of the Galaxy (Debattista et al. 2006; Roškar et al. 2008).”
Bars in Disk-dominated and Bulge-dominated Galaxies at z ~ 0: New Insights from ~3600 SDSS Galaxies (2007, background): “…classical bulges form by gravitational collapse or hierarchical merging, disky bulges are believed to form through gas inflows triggered by bars or any other nonaxisymmetric feature in the gravitational potential (Kormendy 1993; Kormendy & Kennicutt 2004; Jogee et al. 2005; Debattista et al. 2006).”
Deep GALEX Imaging of the COSMOS HST Field: A First Look at the Morphology of z ~ 0.7 Star-forming Galaxies (2007, background): “Alternatively, it is also possible that some of these bulges are being formed by other means such as secular instabilities (e.g. Debattista et al. 2006; Wang et al. 2006; Kormendy & Kennicutt 2004), also suggested by the fact that most of our star bursting late-type spirals possess bars.”
Characterizing Bars at z ~ 0 in the Optical and NIR: Implications for the Evolution of Barred Disks with Redshift (2006, methodology): “…concentrations (CMCs) present in the inner few hundred parsecs (e.g., Shen & Sellwood 2004; Athanassoula et al. 2005;Martinez-Valpuesta et al. 2006; Debattista et al. 2006), and the distribution and amount of gas in the disk (e.g., Shlosman & Noguchi 1993; Bournaud & Combes 2002; Bournaud et al.…”
BULGE AND CLUMP EVOLUTION IN HUBBLE ULTRA DEEP FIELD CLUMP CLUSTERS, CHAINS AND SPIRAL GALAXIES (2008, background): “Pseudobulges presumably formed more slowly due to vertical bar instabilities (Combes, & Sanders 1981; van den Bosch 1998; Avila-Reese et al. 2005; Debattista et al. 2006; Athanassoula 2007, 2008), and torque-driven accretion (Pfenniger & Norman 1990; Zhang 1999; see reviews in Kormendy & Kennicutt…”
Bulge Formation by the Coalescence of Giant Clumps in Primordial Disk Galaxies (2008, background): “In contrast, late-type galaxies (e.g., later than Sbc; Thomas & Davies 2006) tend to have ‘‘pseudobulges,’’ which are somewhat blue, span a wide range of ages, and have more disklike properties, including small-n Sersic profiles (e.g., Debattista et al. 2006; Carollo et al. 2007).”
THE OUTER DISKS OF EARLY-TYPE GALAXIES. I. SURFACE-BRIGHTNESS PROFILES OF BARRED GALAXIES (2007, background): “…disks (e.g., Ferguson & Clarke 2001; Slyz et al. 2002), as well as for such features as disk truncations or antitruncations (e.g., Battaner, Florido, & Jiménez-Vicente 2002; Schaye 2004; Elmegreen & Hunter 2006; Debattista et al. 2006; Younger et al. 2007), are almost all strictly onedimensional.”
A unified multiwavelength model of galaxy formation (2015, background): “If the disk satisfies the instability conditionFdisk < Fstab at any timestep, then we assume that the disk forms a bar, which then thickens due to vertical buckling instabilities and evolves into a spheroid (Combes et al. 1990; Debattista et al. 2006).”
The ATLAS3D project - VII. A new look at the morphology of nearby galaxies: the kinematic morphology-density relation (2011, background): “2009) caused by the thickening of the disks and growth of the bulges during close encounters, minor mergers, or secular evolution (Kormendy & Kennicutt 2004; Debattista et al. 2006).”
Stellar population gradients in galaxy discs from the CALIFA survey - The influence of bars (2014, background): “However, most numerical simulations show that once they formed, bars are robust structures (Shen & Sellwood 2004; Athanassoula et al. 2005, 2013; Debattista et al. 2006; Berentzen et al. 2007; Villa-Vargas et al. 2010; Kraljic et al. 2012).”
HOW DO DISKS SURVIVE MERGERS? (2008, background): “Depending on e.g. details of the equation of state, feedback, and rotational support of the gas disk, it may also amount to steady disk contraction (Debattista et al. 2006) or emergence of a two-component disk (Kaufmann et al. 2007; Foyle et al. 2008).”