Related papers: Holes within galaxies: the egg or the hen?
In the past decade, much effort was devoted to measure the masses of supermassive black holes in galactic nuclei, to establish the relation between black hole mass and the global/nuclear properties of the host galaxy, and to understand the…
Galaxies with Milky Way-like stellar masses have a wide range of bulge and black hole masses; in turn, these correlate with other properties such as star formation history. While many processes may drive bulge formation, major and minor…
If the formation of central galaxies in dark matter haloes traces the assembly history of their host haloes, in haloes of fixed mass, central galaxy clustering may show dependence on properties indicating their formation history. Such a…
A dark matter halo is commonly defined as a spherical overdensity of matter with respect to a reference density, such as the critical density or the mean matter density of the Universe. Such definitions can lead to a spurious…
We analyse a sample of massive disk galaxies selected from the SDSS-IV/MaNGA survey to investigate how the evolution of these galaxies depends on their stellar and halo masses. We applied a semi-analytic spectral fitting approach to the…
Observations of gravitational waves from binary black hole mergers, including the recent signals GW231123 and GW230529, have revealed multiple progenitor black holes in the so-called upper and lower mass gaps, respectively. It is generally…
The first massive astrophysical black holes likely formed at high redshifts (z>10) at the centers of low mass (~10^6 Msun) dark matter concentrations. These black holes grow by mergers and gas accretion, evolve into the population of bright…
We study the formation of galaxies by using $N$-body/hydrodynamics simulations to investigate how baryons collect at the centre of dark matter halos. We treat the dark matter as a collisionless fluid and the baryons as an ideal gas. We…
Observations indicate that central galaxies show a significant alignment of their main shape axes with other galaxies in their group, as well as with the large-scale structure of the universe. Simulations have corroborated this finding,…
We consider the possibility that an infalling bulge core or stellar cluster could form an eccentric disk, following tidal disruption by a massive black hole in the center of a galaxy. As a function of central black hole mass, we constrain…
All galaxies are thought to reside within large halos of dark matter, whose properties can only be determined from indirect observations. The formation and assembly of galaxies is determined from the interplay between these dark matter…
Almost every galaxy in the local Universe is observed to have a massive black hole in the centre. The properties of these black holes are observed to tightly correlate with those of their host galaxy which has been interpreted as…
The supermassive black holes observed at the centers of almost all present-day galaxies, had a profound impact on their environment. I highlight the principle of self-regulation, by which supermassive black holes grow until they release…
All massive galaxies likely have supermassive black holes at their centers, and the masses of the black holes are known to correlate with properties of the host galaxy bulge component. Several explanations have been proposed for the…
In hierarchical galaxy formation the stellar halos of galaxies are formed by the accretion of minor satellites and therefore contain valuable information about the (early) assembly process of galaxies. Our GHOSTS survey measures the stellar…
The possibility that the masses of supermassive black holes (SBHs) correlate with the total gravitational mass of their host galaxy, or the mass of the dark matter halo in which they presumably formed, is investigated using a sample of 16…
The observations and evolution of clumpy, high-redshift galaxies are reviewed. Models suggest that the clumps form by gravitational instabilities in a gas-rich disk, interact with each other gravitationally, and then merge in the center…
In the generic CDM cosmogony, dark-matter halos emerge too lumpy and centrally concentrated to host observed galactic disks. Moreover, disks are predicted to be smaller than those observed. We argue that the resolution of these problems may…
While N-body simulations testify for a cuspy profile of the central region of the dark matter haloes, observations favor a shallow, cored density profile of the central region of, at least, some spiral galaxies and dwarf spheroidals. We…
The correlations between the mass of supermassive black holes and properties of their host galaxies are investigated through cosmological simulations. Black holes grow from seeds of 100 solar masses inserted into density peaks present in…