Related papers: Evidence for Merger Remnants in Early-Type Host Ga…
We present near-infrared imaging obtained with ESO VLT/ISAAC of a sample of 16 low luminosity radio-quiet quasars at the epoch around the peak of the quasar activity (2 < z < 3), aimed at investigating their host galaxies. For 11 quasars,…
We test the hypothesis that QSOs are formed via strong tidal interactions or mergers, initially going through an ultraluminous infrared phase, by looking for traces to this phase in the host galaxies of QSOs. We present a systematic…
Blue early-type galaxies with galaxy-scale ongoing star formation are interesting targets in order to understand the stellar mass buildup in elliptical and S0 galaxies in the local Universe. We study the star-forming population of blue…
We have used the 28'x 28' HST image mosaic from the GEMS (Galaxy Evolution from Morphology and SEDs) survey in conjunction with the COMBO-17 photometric redshift survey to constrain the incidence of major mergers between spheroid-dominated…
The present paper discusses the results from an analysis of the images presented in Paper I (astro-ph/0207373) supplemented with new spectroscopic data obtained at Keck. All but one object in the 1-Jy sample show signs of a strong tidal…
A growing body of observational evidence suggests that the luminosity, photometric shape and amount of rotational or anisotropical support in elliptical galaxies may provide vital clues to how they formed. Elliptical galaxies appear to fall…
We present K-band images of 31 radio quasars selected from the B3-VLA quasar sample. A new method has been developed to detect and restore the host galaxies of these quasars. We have detected the host galaxies of 16 of them. Using these…
We describe J,H,K deep imaging of 90 arcmin fields around 4 QSOs and one Radio galaxy at redshifts in the range 0.06 to 0.30, and show their images, luminosity profiles, and NIR 2-colour diagrams of objects. We find that the QSO hosts are…
We used the Hubble Space Telescope WFC3 near-infrared camera to image the host galaxies of a sample of eleven luminous, dust-reddened quasars at z ~ 2 -- the peak epoch of black hole growth and star formation in the Universe -- to test the…
Star-forming blue early-type galaxies at low redshift can give insight to the stellar mass growth of L$*$ elliptical galaxies in the local Universe. We wish to understand the reason for star formation in these otherwise passively evolving…
We report on the optical properties of a sample of 30 BL Lac host galaxies in the redshift range $0.03<z<0.2$, as derived from HST observations. All galaxies are fully resolved in the WFPC2 (F702W filter) images, allowing a quantitative…
We report on deep imaging in 2 filters with the PC2 camera of HST, of five QSOs at redshift ~2, with a range of optical and radio luminosity. The observations included a suite of PSF observations which were used to construct new PSF models,…
Aims: We present a new method that uses luminosity or stellar mass functions combined with clustering measurements to select samples of galaxies at different redshifts likely to follow a progenitor-to-descendant relationship. As the method…
We present the first results from a major HST WFPC2 imaging study aimed at providing the first statistically meaningful comparison of the morphologies, luminosities, scalelengths and colours of the host galaxies of radio-quiet quasars,…
Theoretical considerations and observational data support the idea that mergers were more frequent in the past. At high redshifts, violent interactions and mergers may be implicated in the origin of Lyman-break galaxies, sub-mm starbursts,…
Low-ionization Broad Absorption Line QSOs (LoBALs) are suspected to be merging systems in which extreme, AGN-driven outflows have been triggered. Whether or not LoBALs are uniquely associated with mergers, however, has yet to be…
We search for signatures of recent galaxy close interactions and mergers in a sample of 202 early-type galaxies in the local universe from the public SDSS Stripe82 deep images ($\mu_r \sim 28.5$ mag arcsec$^{-2}$). Using two different…
Interacting galaxies surrounded by HI tidal debris are ideal sites for the study of young clusters and tidal galaxy formation. The process that triggers star formation in the low-density environments outside galaxies is still an open…
New surface brightness profiles from 26 early-type galaxies with partially depleted cores have been extracted from the full radial extent of HST images, giving us a total sample of 31 such core-Sersic galaxies. We have carefully quantified…
(Abridged) We develop a model for the cosmological role of mergers in the evolution of starbursts, quasars, and spheroidal galaxies. Combining halo mass functions (MFs) with empirical halo occupation models, we calculate where major…