Related papers: The relation between stellar populations, structur…
Compact elliptical galaxies are characterized by small sizes and high stellar densities. They are thought to form through tidal stripping of massive progenitors. However, only a handful of them were known, preventing us from understanding…
I present some results of 3D spectroscopy for a small sample of dwarf elliptical galaxies, mostly members of small groups. The galaxies under consideration have a typical absolute magnitude of -18 (B-band), and at the Kormendy's relation…
The formation of globular clusters remains an open debate. Dwarf starburst galaxies are efficient at forming young massive clusters with similar masses as globular clusters and may hold the key to understanding their formation. We study…
We define a volume limited sample of over 14,000 early-type galaxies (ETGs) selected from data release six of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. The density of environment of each galaxy is robustly measured. By comparing narrow band spectral…
The age and chemical composition of the stars in present-day galaxies carry important clues about their star formation processes. The latest generation of population synthesis models have allowed to derive age and stellar metallicity…
This paper addresses the questions of what we have learned about how and when dense star clusters form, and what studies of star clusters have revealed about galaxy formation and evolution. One important observation is that globular…
We study the influence of the environment on the evolution of galaxies by investigating the luminosity function (LF) of galaxies of different morphological types and colours at different environmental density levels. We construct the LFs…
We consider the hypothesis that the formation of elliptical galaxies includes a phase in which star formation is mostly restricted to massive stars, with the bias towards high mass stars increasing with elliptical galaxy mass. The mass…
We present the results of a Hubble Space Telescope (HST) ACS and WFPC2 study of dwarf galaxies in the nearby Perseus Cluster, down to M_V = -12, spanning the core and outer regions of this cluster. We examine how properties such as the…
Globular clusters (GCs) provide one way of determining when the most important periods of star formation in dwarf elliptical (dE) galaxies occurred. Thus, they are also useful for comparing the star formation histories of dwarf and giant…
Galaxy clusters contain a large population of low mass dwarf elliptical galaxies whose exact origin is unclear: their colors, structural properties and kinematics differ substantially from those of dwarf irregulars in the field. We use the…
The fraction of stellar mass contained in globular clusters (GCs), also measured by number as the specific frequency, is a fundamental quantity that reflects both a galaxy's early star formation and its entire merging history. We present…
We present the first 3D observations of a diffuse elliptical galaxy (dE). The good quality data (S/N up to 40) reveal the kinematical signature of an embedded stellar disc, reminiscent of what is commonly observed in elliptical galaxies,…
We have studied a sample of 89 very isolated, elliptical galaxies at z < 0.08 and compared their properties with elliptical galaxies located in a high-density environment such as the Coma supercluster. Our aim is to probe the role of…
We study the stellar populations of 1,923 elliptical galaxies at z<0.05 selected from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey as a function of velocity dispersion, sigma, and environment. We construct average, high signal-to-noise spectra and find the…
In order to investigate the formation mechanisms of the rare compact elliptical galaxies (cE) we have compiled a sample of 25 cEs with good SDSS spectra, covering a range of stellar masses, sizes and environments. They have been visually…
We take advantage of the largest high-resolution simulation of cosmic structure growth ever carried out -- the Millennium Simulation of the concordance LambdaCDM cosmogony -- to study how the star formation histories, ages and metallicities…
In this Paper we investigate the kinematical properties of early-type dwarfs by significantly enlarging the scarce observational sample so far available. We present rotation curves and mean velocity dispersions for four bright dwarf…
As a result of an extensive observational campaign targeting the Virgo cluster, we obtained integrated (drift-scan mode) optical spectra and multiwavelength (UV,U,B,V,H) photometry for 124 and 330 galaxies, respectively, spanning the whole…
We determine relative stellar ages and metallicities mainly for about 80 elliptical galaxies in low and high density environments via the latest binary stellar population (BSP) synthesis model and test a latest hierarchical formation model…