Article contents
Mergers to Bars to Boxy Bulges: A Galaxy Evolution Story
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 April 2016
Extract
Deviations from ellipticity in the bulges of edge-on disk galaxies, seen as ”boxy“, ”peanut-shaped“, or “X-shaped“ isophotes, have been known for some time (Jarvis 1986, Whitmore & Bell 1988). Contrary to earlier proposals that these features represent accreted material, recent numerical work (Combes et al. 1990; Raha et al. 1991) suggests that they form when the bars in barred galaxies experience a vertical bending instability and deform out of the disk plane. We have found this latter mechanism at work in simulations in which a bar is induced when a large disk galaxy accretes a small companion galaxy, thus incorporating the mechanism into the evolutionary framework of galaxy interactions. In support of this picture we present observations of Hickson 87a, an edge-on S0 galaxy whose morphological peculiarities exactly match those seen in the simulation.
- Type
- Posters of Part VII and Part VIII
- Information
- Copyright
- Copyright © Astronomical Society of the Pacific 1996
References
- 1
- Cited by