Galaxy Scaling Relations as a Result of Secular Evolution

Abstract

The secular evolution process which slowly transforms the morphology of a given galaxy over its lifetime through mostly internal dynamical mechanisms could naturally account for most of the observed properties of physical galaxies (Zhang 2003a). As an emerging paradigm for galaxy evolution, its dynamical foundations had been established in the past few years (Zhang 1996, 1998, 1999). In this paper, we explore further implications of the secular morphological evolution process in reproducing the well-known scaling relations of galaxies.