Related papers: Disk Growth in Bulge-Dominated Galaxies: Molecular…
From this vast subject, I will pick out and review three specific topics, namely the formation and evolution of bars, the formation of bulges, and the evolution during multiple major mergers. Bars form naturally in galactic discs. Their…
The importance of angular momentum in regulating the sizes of galactic disks and by this their star formation history is highlighted. Tidal torques and accretion of satellites in principle provide enough angular momentum to form disks with…
Adopting a single-zone framework, with accretion of primordial gas on a free-fall timescale, the chemical evolution of the Galactic bulge is calculated, assuming (i) a corresponding rapid timescale for star formation, and (ii) an initial…
High-redshift star-forming galaxies often have irregular morphologies with {\it giant clumps} containing up to $10^{8-9}$ solar masses of gas and stars. The origin and evolution of giant clumps are debated both theoretically and…
We compare the cosmic evolution of star formation rates in galaxies with that of their neutral hydrogen densities. We highlight the need for neutral hydrogen to be continually replenished from a reservoir of ionized gas to maintain the…
Empirical star formation laws from the last 20 years are reviewed with a comparison to simulations. The current form in main galaxy disks has a linear relationship between the star formation rate per unit area and the molecular cloud mass…
We present an analytic formalism that describes the evolution of the stellar, gas, and metal content of galaxies. It is based on the idea, inspired by hydrodynamic simulations, that galaxies live in a slowly-evolving equilibrium between…
Cosmological numerical simulations of galaxy evolution show that accretion of metal-poor gas from the cosmic web drives the star formation in galaxy disks. Unfortunately, the observational support for this theoretical prediction is still…
Galaxies in clusters are gas-deficient and a number of possible explanations for this observation have been advanced, including galaxy-cluster tidal interactions, galaxy harassment, and ISM-ICM gas stripping. In this paper, we use a…
We reexamine the systematic properties of local galaxy populations, using published surveys of star formation, structure, and gas content. After recalibrating star formation measures, we are able to reliably measure specific star formation…
I review some recent results about the molecular content of galaxies, obtained essentially from the CO lines, but also dense tracers, or the dust continuum emission. New results have been obtained on molecular cloud physics, and their…
We use deep far-infrared data from the PEP/GOODS-Herschel surveys and rest frame ultraviolet photometry to study the evolution of the molecular gas mass function of normal star forming galaxies. Computing the molecular gas mass, M(mol), by…
The gas accretion and star-formation histories of galaxies like the Milky Way remain an outstanding problem in astrophysics. Observations show that 8 billion years ago, the progenitors to Milky Way-mass galaxies were forming stars 30 times…
The evolution of galactic disks from their early stages is dominated by gasdynamical effects such as gas infall, galactic fountains, and galactic outflows, and further more. The influence of these processes is only understandable in the…
We investigate a model of disk galaxies whereby viscous evolution of the gaseous disk drives material inwards to form a proto-bulge. We start from the standard picture of disk formation through the settling of gas into a dark halo potential…
Scaling from the empirical metal yield as measured in clusters of galaxies, it is inferred that early in the evolution of the Galaxy the bulge stellar population has produced $\sim 10^9\msun$ of metals, at least 5 times more than the total…
High resolution X-ray spectra reveal hidden cooling flows depositing cold gas at the centres of massive nearby early-type galaxies with little sign of normal star formation. Optical observations are revealing that a bottom-heavy Initial…
To break the degeneracy among galactic stellar components, we extract kinematic structures using the framework described in Du et al. (2019, 2020). For example, the concept of stellar halos is generalized to weakly-rotating structures that…
In this letter we construct a large sample of early-type galaxies with measured gas-phase metallicities from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and Galaxy Zoo in order to investigate the origin of the gas that fuels their residual star formation.…
Disk galaxies evolve over time through processes that may rearrange both the radial mass profile and the metallicity distribution within the disk. This review of such slow changes is largely, though not entirely, restricted to…