2006/02/09 by X. Hernandez, X. Hernández, Bernardo Cervantes Sodi +3
Arts and Humanities · Physics and Astronomy · #Architecture and Art History Studies #Astrophysics (astro-ph) #FOS: Physical sciences #Galaxies: Formation, Evolution, Phenomena #Spanish Literature and Culture Studies #astro-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.astro-ph/0602225
4 pages, 4 figures, Invited Talk to the 11th Latin-American Regional IAU meeting, Pucon, Chile 2005
arxiv created 2006/02/09 · openalex publication_date 2006/02/09 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
We present a highly simplified model of the dynamical structure of a disk galaxy where only two parmeters fully determine the solution, mass and angular momentum. We show through simple physical scalings that once the mass has been fixed, the angular momentum parameter λ is expected to regulate such critical galactic disk properties as colour, thickness of the disk and disk to bulge ratio. It is hence expected to be the determinant physical ingeredient resulting in a given Hubble type. A simple analytic estimate of λ for an observed system is provided. An explicit comparison of the distribution of several galactic parameters against both Hubble type and λ is performed using observed galaxies. Both such distributions exhibit highly similar characteristics for all galactic properties studied, suggesting λ as a physically motivated classification parameter for disk galaxies.