Related papers: Dry Mergers: A Crucial Test for Galaxy Formation
Galaxy mergers are believed to play a key role in transforming star-forming disk galaxies into quenched ellipticals. Most of our theoretical knowledge about such morphological transformations does, however, rely on idealised simulations…
The color-magnitude relation of early-type galaxies differs slightly but significantly from a pure power-law, curving downwards at low and upwards at large luminosities (Mr>-20.5 and Mr<-22.5). This remains true of the color-size relation,…
Many recent observations and numerical simulations suggest that nearby massive, early-type galaxies were formed through a "two-phase" process. In the proposed second phase, the extended stellar envelope was accumulated through many dry…
Galaxy mergers are known to host abundant young massive cluster (YMC) populations, whose formation mechanism is still not well-understood. Here, we present a high-resolution galaxy merger simulation with explicit star formation and stellar…
We use a suite of semi-empirical models to predict galaxy merger rates and contributions to bulge growth as functions of merger mass, redshift, and mass ratio. The models use empirical halo occupation constraints to identify mergers,…
We study the infall of a subhalo in its parent halo due to dynamical friction. Using expected mass and spatial distributions of subhaloes, in unison with the derived infall time-scale, we calculate the expected merger stellar mass growth…
We investigate the fraction of close pairs and morphologically identified mergers on and above the star-forming main sequence (MS) at 0.2$\leq z\leq$2.0. The novelty of our work lies in the use of a non-parametric morphological…
(Abridged) We probe the merging channel of massive galaxies over the z=0.3-1.3 redshift window by studying close pairs in a sample of 238 galaxies with stellar mass >1E11Msun, from the deep (m<26.5AB, 3 sigma) SHARDS survey. SHARDS provides…
A major goal of contemporary astrophysics is understanding the origin of the most massive galaxies in the universe, particularly nearby ellipticals and spirals. Theoretical models of galaxy formation have existed for many decades, although…
Galaxy mergers and interactions are often invoked to explain enhanced star formation, black hole growth, and mass build-up of galaxies at later cosmic times, but their effect is poorly understood at high redshift ($z>2$). We use JADES data…
We use semi-analytical modelling of galaxy formation to predict the redshift-size-evolution of elliptical galaxies. Using a simple model in which relative sizes of elliptical galaxies of a given mass correlate with the fraction of stars…
We present a newly observed relation between galaxy mass and radial metallicity gradients of early-type galaxies. Our sample of 51 early-type galaxies encompasses a comprehensive mass range from dwarf to brightest cluster galaxies. The…
In the context of the hierarchical formation of galaxies, we investigated the role played by mergers in shaping the scale relations of galaxies, that is the projections of their Fundamental Plane onto the \IeRe, \IeSig, \MRa\ and \Lsig\…
The rate of major galaxy-galaxy merging is theoretically predicted to steadily increase with redshift during the peak epoch of massive galaxy development ($1{\leq}z{\leq}3$). We use close-pair statistics to objectively study the incidence…
We present a study on the stellar mass growth of the progenitors of local massive galaxies with a variety of number density selections with $n\le1\times10^{-4}\,\rm{Mpc^{-3}}$ (corresponding to $M_*=10^{11.24}\rm{M_{\odot}}$ at z=0.3) in…
It is difficult to accurately identify galaxy mergers and it is an even larger challenge to classify them by their mass ratio or merger stage. In previous work we used a suite of simulated mergers to create a classification technique that…
The relation between the star formation rate and the stellar mass of star-forming galaxies has been used to argue that major mergers cannot be the main driver of star formation. Here, we re-examine these arguments using the representative…
We construct merger trees for galaxies identified in a cosmological hydrodynamical simulation and use them to characterize predicted merger rates as a function of redshift, galaxy mass, and merger mass ratio. At z=0.3, we find a mean rate…
It is still a challenge to assess the merger fraction of galaxies at different cosmic epochs in order to probe the evolution of their mass assembly. Using the Illustris cosmological simulations, we investigate the relation between the…
We numerically investigate chemodynamical evolution of major disk-disk galaxy mergers in order to explore the origin of mass-dependent chemical, photometric, and spectroscopic properties observed in elliptical galaxies. We particularly…