Tidally Induced Offset Disks in Magellanic Spiral Galaxies
  Magellanic spiral galaxies are a class of one-armed systems that often
exhibit an offset stellar bar, and are rarely found around massive spiral
galaxies. Using a set of N-body and hydrodynamic simulations we consider a
dwarf-dwarf galaxy interaction as the driving mechanism for the formation of
this peculiar class of systems. We investigate here the relation between the
dynamical, stellar and gaseous disk center and the bar. In all our simulations
the bar center always coincides with the dynamical center, while the stellar
disk becomes highly asymmetric during the encounter causing the photometric
center of the Magellanic galaxy disk to become mismatched with both the bar and
the dynamical center. The disk asymmetries persist for almost 2 Gyrs, the time
that it takes for the disk to be re-centered with the bar, and well after the
companion has passed. This explains the nature of the offset bar found in many
Magellanic-type galaxies, including the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) and NGC
3906. In particular, these results, once applied to the LMC, suggest that the
dynamical center should reside in the bar center instead of the HI center as
previously assumed, pointing to a variation in the current estimate of the
north component of the LMC proper motion.
