Bulge components of disc galaxies are the high-density centers interior to their outer discs. Once thought to be equivalent to elliptical galaxies, their observed properties and formation histories turn out to be richer and more varied than those of ellipticals. This book reviews progress in many areas of bulge studies. Two advances deserve emphasis: (1) Observations divide bulges into "classical bulges" that look indistinguishable from ellipticals and "pseudobulges" that are discier and (except in S0s) more actively star-forming than are ellipticals. Classical bulges and ellipticals are thought to form by major galaxy mergers. Discy pseudobulges are a product of the slow ("secular") evolution of galaxy discs. Nonaxisymmetries such as bars and oval distortions transport some disc gas toward the center, where it starbursts and builds a dense central component that is discier in structure than are classical bulges. Secular evolution explains many regular structures (e.g., rings) seen in galaxy discs. It is a new area of galaxy evolution work that complements hierarchical clustering. (2) Studies of high-redshift galaxies reveal that their discs are so gas-rich that they are violently unstable to the formation of mass clumps that sink to the center and merge. This is an alternative channel for the formation of classical bulges.This chapter summarizes big-picture successes and unsolved problems in the formation of bulges and ellipticals and their coevolution (or not) with supermassive black holes. I present an observer's perspective on simulations of cold dark matter galaxy formation including baryonic physics. Our picture of the quenching of star formation is becoming general and secure at redshifts z < 1. I conclude with a list of major uncertainties and problems. The biggest challenge is to produce realistic bulges + ellipticals and realistic discs that overlap over a factor of > 1000 in mass but that differ from each other as we observe over that whole range. A related difficulty is how hierarchical clustering makes so many giant, bulgeless galaxies in field but not cluster environments. I present arguments that we rely too much on star-formation feedback and AGN feedback to solve these challenges.
We retrace the development of a kinematic scaling relation, referred to as the Fundamental Manifold (FM), that addresses shortcomings of the commonly used fundamental plane in certain contexts. We then examine whether bulges separately satisfy the FM relation and discuss what the success or failure of such a match implies for the nature of classical- and pseudo-bulges. On the basis of this preliminary analysis we suggest that while classical bulges appear to be independent, dynamically complete subsystems within their host galaxies that satisfy the scaling relation, pseudobulges do not satisfy the scaling relation and so probably consist of an unrepresentative subset of disc stars. This is currently not a unique explanation of the results, but the use of kinematic scaling relations with larger samples, done in a more systematic manner, could lead to a more definitive resolution on the nature of bulges.
Most every graduate student in astronomy today knows what the "bulge" of a spiral galaxy is by name and what it looks like. A century ago few professional astronomers knew, or even cared. We trace the early and quite casual usage of the term (and its competitors) and then follow the later and gradually more strict adoption of the term "bulge", needed to call out a major component of galaxy morphology. In the specific context of the Milky Way "The Galactic Bulge" was a proper name. Only later, as they were seen and measured in other galaxies, were these same structural features to become known generically as "bulges". That term finally won out over its more unwieldy competitors such as the "amorphous central region", the "unresolved nuclear region" or the highly ambiguous term "central nucleus".
In the cold dark matter (CDM) paradigm, bulges easily form through galaxy mergers, either major orminor, or through clumpy discs in the early universe, where clumps are driven to the center by dynamical friction. Also pseudobulges, with a more discy morphology and kinematics, can form more slowly through secular evolution of a bar, where resonant stars are elevated out of the plane, in a peanut/box shape. As a result, in CDM cosmological simulations, it is very difficult to find a bulgeless galaxy, while they are observed very frequently in the local universe. A different picture emerges in alternative models of the missing mass problem. In MOND (MOdified Newtonian Dynamics), galaxy mergers are much less frequent, since the absence of dark matter halos reduces the dynamical friction between two galaxies. Also, while clumpy galaxies lead to rapid classical bulge formation in CDM, the inefficient dynamical friction with MOND in the early-universe galaxies prevents the clumps to coalesce together in the center to form spheroids. This leads to less frequent and less massive classical bulges. Bars in MOND are more frequent and stronger, and have a more constant pattern speed, which modifies significantly the pseudobulge morphology. The fraction of pseudobulges is expected to be dominant in MOND.
Near infrared images from the COBE satellite presented the first clear evidence that our Milky Way galaxy contains a boxy shaped bulge. Recent years have witnessed a gradual paradigm shift in the formation and evolution of the Galactic bulge. Bulges were commonly believed to form in the dynamical violence of galaxy mergers. However, it has become increasingly clear that the main body of the Milky Way bulge is not a classical bulge made by previous major mergers, instead it appears to be a bar seen somewhat end-on. The Milky Way bar can form naturally from a precursor disc and thicken vertically by the internal firehose/buckling instability, giving rise to the boxy appearance. This picture is supported by many lines of evidence, including the asymmetric parallelogram shape, the strong cylindrical rotation (i.e., nearly constant rotation regardless of the height above the disc plane), the existence of an intriguing X-shaped structure in the bulge, and perhaps the metallicity gradients. We review the major theoretical models and techniques to understand the Milky Way bulge. Despite the progresses in recent theoretical attempts, a complete bulge formation model that explains the full kinematics and metallicity distribution is still not fully understood. Upcoming large surveys are expected to shed new light on the formation history of the Galactic bulge.
The Milky Way bulge offers a unique opportunity to investigate in detail the role that different processes such as dynamical instabilities, hierarchical merging, and dissipational collapse may have played in the history of the Galaxy formation and evolution based on its resolved stellar population properties. Large observation programs and surveys of the bulge are providing for the first time a look into the global view of the MilkyWay bulge that can be compared with the bulges of other galaxies, and be used as a template for detailed comparison with models. The Milky Way has been shown to have a boxy/peanut (B/P) bulge and recent evidence seems to suggest the presence of an additional spheroidal component. In this review we summarize the global chemical abundances, kinematics and structural properties that allow us to disentangle these multiple components and provide constraints to understand their origin. The investigation of both detailed and global properties of the bulge now provide us with the opportunity to characterize the bulge as observed in models, and to place the mixed component bulge scenario in the general context of external galaxies. When writing this review, we considered the perspectives of researchers working with the Milky Way and researchers working with external galaxies. It is an attempt to approach both communities for a fruitful exchange of ideas.
Nuclear star clusters are among the densest stellar systems known and are common in both early- and late-type galaxies. They exhibit scaling relations with their host galaxy which may be related to those of supermassive black holes. These may therefore help us to unravel the complex physical processes occurring at the centres of galaxies. The properties of nuclear stellar systems suggest that their formation requires both dissipational and dissipationless processes. They have stellar populations of different ages, from stars as old as their host galaxy to young stars formed in the last 100 Myr. Therefore star formation must be happening either directly in the nuclear star cluster or in its vicinity. The secular processes that fuel the formation of pseudobulges very likely also contributes to nuclear star cluster growth.
The knowledge of the intrinsic three-dimensional (3D) structure of galaxy components provides crucial information about the physical processes driving their formation and evolution. In this paper I discuss the main developments and results in the quest to better understand the 3D shape of galaxy bulges. I start by establishing the basic geometrical description of the problem. Our understanding of the intrinsic shape of elliptical galaxies and galaxy discs is then presented in a historical context, in order to place the role that the 3D structure of bulges play in the broader picture of galaxy evolution. Our current view on the 3D shape of the MilkyWay bulge and future prospects in the field are also depicted.
In this review our aim is to summarize the observed properties of pseudobulges and classical bulges. We utilize an empirical approach to studying the properties of bulges in disk galaxies, and restrict our analysis to statistical proper- ties. A clear bimodality is observed in a number of properties including morphology, structural properties, star formation, gas content & stellar population, and kinematics. As well as summarizing known methods to identify pseudobulges and classical bulges we also show new results, including absorption line indices that can be used to identify different bulge types. We conclude by summarizing those properties that isolate pseudobulges from classical bulges. Our intention is to describe a practical, easy to use, list of criteria for identifying bulge types.
The latest generation of cosmological simulations are on the verge of being able to resolve the structure of bulges for the first time. Hence, we review the current state of bulge formation in cosmological simulations, and discuss open questions that can be addressed in the near future by simulators, with a particular focus on merger-driven bulge growth. Galaxy mergers have long been assumed to produce classical bulges in disk galaxies. Under this bulge-formation model, though, the high rates of mergers in Cold Dark Matter galaxy formation theory predict many more classical bulges than are observed. Furthermore, simulations of galaxy formation continue to generally produce too massive of bulges. Feedback offers a promising avenue for reducing merger-driven bulge growth by maintaining high gas fractions in galaxies and ejecting low-angular momentum gas driven to the centers of galaxies. After reviewing the results of relevant research that has been published to date, we use cosmological simulations to explore the ability of feedback to reduce or even prevent bulge growth during mergers. In dwarf galaxies, mergers actually reduce the central concentration of galaxies as the induced burst of star formation drives out low angular momentum material. This result shows the potential for feedback to reduce central mass growth. However, we also demonstrate that it is very difficult for current stellar feedback models to reproduce the small bulges observed in more massive disk galaxies like the Milky Way. We argue that feedback models need to be improved, or an additional source of feedback such as AGN is necessary to generate the required outflows.
We review the observed morphological, photometric, and kinematic properties of boxy/peanut (B/P) shape bulges. Nearly half of the bulges in the nearby edge-on galaxies have these characteristics, which fraction is similar to the observed bar fraction in Hubble types earlier than Scd. B/P bulges are generally detected in the edge-on view, but it has been recently demonstrated that barlenses, which are lens-like structures embedded in bars, are the more face-on counterparts of the B/P bulges. Multi-component structural decompositions have shown that B/P/barlens structures are likely to account for most of the bulge light, including the early-type discs harboringmost of the bulge mass in galaxies. These structures appear in bright galaxies, in a mass range near to the Milky Way mass. Also the other properties of these bulges, including morphology (X-shaped), kinematics (cylindrical rotation), or stellar populations (old), are similar to those observed in the Milky Way. Cool central discs are often embedded in the B/P/barlens bulges. Barred galaxies contain also dynamically hot classical bulges, but it is not yet clear to what extent they are really dynamically distinct structure components, and to what extent stars wrapped into the central regions of the galaxies during the formation and evolution of bars. If most of the bulge mass in the Milky Way mass galaxies in the nearby universe indeed resides in the B/P-shape bulges, and not in the classical bulges, that idea needs to be integrated into the paradigm of galaxy formation.
Galactic bulges are complex systems. Once thought to be small-scale versions of elliptical galaxies, advances in astronomical instrumentation (spectroscopy in particular) has revealed a wealth of photometric and kinematic substructure in otherwise simple-looking components. This review provides an overview of how our perspective on galactic bulges has changed over the years. While it is mainly focused on aspects related to the dynamical state of their stars, there will be natural connections to other properties (e.g. morphology, stellar populations) discussed in other reviews in this volume.
With references to both key and oft-forgotten pioneering works, this article starts by presenting a review into how we came to believe in the existence of massive black holes at the centres of galaxies. It then presents the historical development of the near-linear (black hole)-(host spheroid) mass relation, before explaining why this has recently been dramatically revised. Past disagreement over the slope of the (black hole)-(velocity dispersion) relation is also explained, and the discovery of sub-structure within the (black hole)-(velocity dispersion) diagram is discussed. As the search for the fundamental connection between massive black holes and their host galaxies continues, the competing array of additional black hole mass scaling relations for samples of predominantly inactive galaxies are presented.
Bars have a complex three-dimensional shape. In particular their inner part is vertically much thicker than the parts further out. Viewed edge-on, the thick part of the bar is what is commonly known as a boxy-, peanut- or X- bulge and viewed face-on it is referred to as a barlens. These components are due to disc and bar instabilities and are composed of disc material. I review here their formation, evolution and dynamics, using simulations, orbital structure theory and comparisons to observations.
The role of disk instabilities, such as bars and spiral arms, and the associated resonances, in growing bulges in the inner regions of disk galaxies have long been studied in the low-redshift nearby Universe. There it has long been probed observationally, in particular through peanut-shaped bulges. This secular growth of bulges in modern disk galaxies is driven by weak, non-axisymmetric instabilities: it mostly produces pseudo-bulges at slow rates and with long star-formation timescales. Disk instabilities at high redshift (z>1) in moderate-mass to massive galaxies (10^10 to a few 10^11 Msun of stars) are very different from those found in modern spiral galaxies. High-redshift disks are globally unstable and fragment into giant clumps containing 10^8-10^9 Msun of gas and stars each, which results in highly irregular galaxy morphologies. The clumps and other features associated to the violent instability drive disk evolution and bulge growth through various mechanisms, on short timescales. The giant clumps can migrate inward and coalesce into the bulge in a few 10^8 yr. The instability in the very turbulent media drives intense gas inflows toward the bulge and nuclear region. Thick disks and supermassive black holes can grow concurrently as a result of the violent instability. This chapter reviews the properties of high-redshift disk instabilities, the evolution of giant clumps and other features associated to the instability, and the resulting growth of bulges and associated sub-galactic components.
This chapter summarizes our current understanding of the stellar population properties of bulges and outlines important future research directions.
The formation of dwarf spheroidal galaxies in the Local Group from disky progenitors via tidal interaction with a bigger host is one of the most promising scenarios of their origin. Using N-body simulations we study the process by following the evolution of a disky dwarf orbiting a Milky Way-like host. We focus on the effect of the orientation of the dwarf galaxy disk's angular momentum with respect to the orbital one. We find a strong dependence of the efficiency of the transformation from a disk to a spheroid on the disk orientation. The effect is strongest for the exactly prograde and weakest for the exactly retrograde orbit. In the prograde case the stellar component forms a strong bar and remains prolate until the end of the evolution, while its rotation is very quickly replaced by random motions of the stars. In the retrograde case the dwarf remains oblate, does not form a bar and loses rotation very slowly. Our results suggest that resonant effects are the most important mechanism underlying the evolution while tidal shocking plays only a minor role.
The Gaussian Kinematic Formula (GKF, see Adler and Taylor (2007,2011)) is an extremely powerful tool allowing for explicit analytic predictions of expected values of Minkowski functionals under realistic experimental conditions for cosmological data collections. In this paper, we implement Minkowski functionals on multipoles and needlet components of CMB fields, thus allowing a better control of cosmic variance and extraction of information on both harmonic and real domains; we then exploit the GKF to provide their expected values on spherical maps, in the presence of arbitrary sky masks, and under nonGaussian circumstances.
