Copyright © 2004 by Annual Reviews. All rights reserved
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| Annu. Rev. Astron. Astrophys. 2004. 42:
603-683 Copyright © 2004 by Annual Reviews. All rights reserved |
Reprinted with kind permission from Annual Reviews, 4139 El Camino Way, Palo Alto, California, USA
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ABSTRACT. The Universe is in transition. At early times, galactic evolution was dominated by hierarchical clustering and merging, processes that are violent and rapid. In the far future, evolution will mostly be secular: the slow rearrangement of energy and mass that results from interactions involving collective phenomena such as bars, oval disks, spiral structure, and triaxial dark halos. Both processes are important now. This paper reviews internal secular evolution, concentrating on one important consequence, the buildup of dense central components in disk galaxies that look like classical, merger-built bulges but that were made slowly out of disk gas. We call these pseudobulges.
We begin with an "existence proof" - a review of how bars rearrange disk gas into outer rings, inner rings, and stuff dumped onto the center. Simulation results correspond closely to the morphology of barred galaxies. In the simulations, gas transported to small radii reaches high densities that plausibly feed star formation. In the observations, many SB and oval galaxies have dense central concentrations of gas and star formation. Optical colors and spectra often imply young stellar populations. So the formation of pseudobulges is well supported by theory and observations. It is embedded in a broader evolution picture that accounts for much of the richness observed in galaxy structure.
If secular processes built dense central components that masquerade
as bulges, how can we distinguish them from merger-built bulges?
Observations show that pseudobulges retain a memory of their disky
origin. That is, they have one or more characteristics of disks: (1)
flatter shapes than those of
classical bulges, (2) correspondingly large ratios of ordered to random
velocities indicative of disk dynamics, (3) small velocity dispersions
with respect to the
Faber-Jackson correlation between
and bulge luminosity, (4) spiral structure or nuclear bars in the "bulge"
part of the light profile, (5) nearly exponential brightness profiles,
and (6) starbursts. These structures occur preferentially in barred and
oval galaxies in which secular evolution should be most rapid. So the
cleanest examples of pseudobulges are recognizable.
Are their formation timescales plausible? We use measurements of central gas densities and star formation rates to show that pseudobulges of the observed densities form on reasonable timescales of a few billion years.
Thus a large variety of observational and theoretical results contribute to a new picture of galaxy evolution that complements hierarchical clustering and merging. Secular evolution consists of more than the aging of stellar populations. Every galaxy is dynamically evolving.
Key Words: galaxy dynamics, galaxy structure, galaxy evolution
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