Paper detail

Inner polar gaseous disks: incidence, ages, possible origin

We review our current knowledge about a particular case of decoupled gas kinematics -- inner ionized-gas polar disks. Though more difficult to be noticed, they seem to be more numerous than their large-scale counterparts; our recent estimates imply about 10 per cent of early-type disk galaxies to be hosts of inner polar disks. Since in the most cases the kinematics of the inner polar gaseous disks is decoupled from the kinematics of the outer large-scale gaseous disks and since they nested around very old stellar nuclei, we speculate that the inner polar disks may be relics of very early events of external gas accretion several Gyr ago. Such view is in agreement with our new paradigm of the disk galaxies evolution.