Galaxy Bulges and Elliptical Galaxies - Lecture Notes

Our knowledge on the central components of disk galaxies has grown substantially in the past few decades, particularly so in the last. This frantic activity and the complexity of the subject promote confusion in the community. In these notes, I discuss the concept of galactic bulge and its different flavors. I also address fundamental scaling relations and the bulge-elliptical galaxy connection, their central black holes and formation models. In particular, I aim at conveying three important notions: (i): box/peanuts are just the inner parts of bars; (ii): the physical reality of two different families of bulges is evident; and (iii): at the high mass end, at least, classical bulges are not just scaled down ellipticals surrounded by disks.

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