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Abstract:

Techniques for the construction of dynamical Galaxy models should be considered essential infrastructure that should be put in place before GAIA flies. Three possible modelling techniques are discussed. Although one of these seems to have significantly more potential than the other two, at this stage work should be done on all three. A major effort is needed to decide how to make a model consistent with a catalogue such as that which GAIA will produce. Given the complexity of the problem, it is argued that a hierarchy of models should be constructed, of ever increasing complexity and quality of fit to the data. The potential that resonances and tidal streams have to indicate how a model should be refined is briefly discussed.

Abstract:

I review evidence that galaxies form from gas that falls into potential wells cold, rather than from virialized gas, and that formation stops once an atmosphere of trapped virialized gas has accumulated. Disk galaxies do not have such atmospheres, so their formation is ongoing. During galaxy formation feedback is an efficient process, and the nuclear regions of disk galaxies blow winds. The cold infalling gas that drives continued star formation has a significant component of angular momentum perpendicular to that of the disk. Extraplanar gas has to be understood in the context set by nuclear outflows and cold skew-rotating cosmic infall.

Abstract:

[Abridged] We present a novel technique, dubbed FiEstAS, to estimate the underlying density field from a discrete set of sample points in an arbitrary multidimensional space. FiEstAS assigns a volume to each point by means of a binary tree. Density is then computed by integrating over an adaptive kernel. As a first test, we construct several Monte Carlo realizations of a Hernquist profile and recover the particle density in both real and phase space. At a given point, Poisson noise causes the unsmoothed estimates to fluctuate by a factor ~2 regardless of the number of particles. This spread can be reduced to about 1 dex (~26 per cent) by our smoothing procedure. [...] We conclude that our algorithm accurately measure the phase-space density up to the limit where discreteness effects render the simulation itself unreliable. Computationally, FiEstAS is orders of magnitude faster than the method based on Delaunay tessellation that Arad et al. employed, making it practicable to recover smoothed density estimates for sets of 10^9 points in 6 dimensions.

Abstract:

We present surface photometry for the central regions of a sample of 48 spiral galaxies (mostly unbarred and barred of type Sbc or Sc) observed with the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph on board the Hubble Space Telescope. Surface brightness profiles (SBPs) were derived and modeled with a Nuker law. We also analyzed archival Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 images with a larger field of view, which are available for 18 galaxies in our sample. We modeled the extracted bulge SBPs with an exponential, an r1/4, or an r n profile. In agreement with previous studies, we find that bulges of Sbc galaxies fall into two categories: bulges well described by an exponential profile and those well described by an r1/4 profile. Only one galaxy requires the use of a more general Sérsic profile to properly describe the bulge. Nuclear photometrically distinct components are found in ∼55% of the galaxies. For those that we classify as star clusters on the basis of their resolved extent, we find absolute magnitudes that are brighter on average than those previously identified in spiral galaxies. This might be due to a bias in our sample toward star-forming galaxies, combined with a trend for star-forming galaxies to host brighter central clusters.