We study gravitational lensing by spiral galaxies, using realistic models consisting of halo, disk, and bulge components combined to produce a flat rotation curve. Proper dynamical normalization of the models is critical because a disk requires less mass than a spherical halo to produce the same rotation curve—a face-on Mestel disk has a lensing cross section only 41% as large as a singular iso...

The positron emissivity of the Galactic bulge and disk, resulting from radioactivity of SNIa, is reassessed in the light of a recent evaluation of the SNIa rate. It is found that the disk may supply more positrons than required by recent SPI/INTEGRAL observations, but the bulge (where the characteristic e annihilation line at 511 keV is in fact observed) only about 10%. It is argued that a larg...

We are undertaking a large scale radial velocity survey of the Galactic bulge which uses M giant stars selected from the 2MASS catalog as targets for the CTIO 4m Hydra multi-object spectrograph. The aim of this survey is to test dynamical models of the bulge and to quantify the importance, if any, of cold stellar streams in the bulge and its vicinity. Here we report on the kinematics of a strip...

A potential mechanism is proposed to account for the fact that supermassive black holes (SMBHs) in disk galaxies appear to be smaller than those in elliptical galaxies in the same luminosity range. We consider the formation of SMBHs by radiation drag (Poynting-Robertson effect), which extracts angular momentum from interstellar matter and thereby drives the mass accretion onto a galactic center...

DNA misalignment occurs in homopolymer tracts during replication and can lead to frameshift mutations. Polymerase (pol) recognition of primer-templates containing bulge structures and the transmission of a bulge through a polymerase binding site or replication complex are important components of frameshift mutagenesis. In this report, we describe the interaction of the catalytic core of pol wit...

In this paper I present a new two-dimensional decomposition technique, which models the surface photometry of a galaxy with an exponential light profile for both bulge and disk and, when necessary, with a Freeman bar. The new technique was tested for systematic errors on both artificial and real data and compared with widely used one-dimensional decomposition techniques, where the luminosity pr...

We present a map of 511 keV electron-positron annihilation emission, based on data accumulated with the SPI spectrometer aboard ESA's INTEGRAL gamma-ray observatory, that covers approximately ∼ 95% of the celestial sphere. Within the exposed sky area, 511 keV line emission is significantly detected towards the galactic bulge region and, at a very low level, from the galactic disk. The bulge emi...

We present a new determination of the metallicity distribution, age, and luminosity function of the Galactic bulge stellar population. By combining near-IR data from the 2MASS survey, from the SOFI imager at ESO NTT and the NICMOS camera on board HST we were able to construct color-magnitude diagrams (CMD) and luminosity functions (LF) with large statistics and small photometric errors from the...

Degenerative disc disease and disc bulge in the lumbar spine are common sources of lower back pain. Little is known regarding disc bulge migration and lumbar segmental mobility as the lumbar spine moves from flexion to extension. In this study, 329 symptomatic (low back pain with or without neurological symptoms) patients with an average age of 43.5 years with varying degrees of disc degenerati...