Related papers: Supermassive black holes, star formation and downs…
The last decade of research on elliptical galaxies has produced a wealth of new information concerning both their detailed structure and their global scaling relations. We review the old and new results about isophote shapes and…
Over the last few years, the existence of mutual feedback effects between accreting supermassive black holes powering AGN and star formation in their host galaxies has become evident. This means that the formation and the evolution of AGN…
The observational link between Supermassive Black Holes (SMBH) and galaxies at low redshift seems to be very tight, and statistically the global evolution of star formation activity and BH accretion activity also seem to trace each other…
In hierarchical models of galaxy formation, ellipticals form from the merging of disk galaxies drawn together by gravity as their surrounding dark halos coalesce. Using semi-analytic techniques, we are able to follow the merging, star…
We incorporate a simple scheme for the growth of supermassive black holes into semi-analytic models that follow the formation and evolution of galaxies in a cold dark matter dominated Universe. We assume that supermassive black holes are…
A major amendment in recent models of hierarchical galaxy formation is the inclusion of so-called AGN feedback. The energy input from an active central massive black hole is invoked to suppress star formation in early-type galaxies at later…
We investigate the relationship between black hole accretion and star formation in a sample of 453 $z\approx0.3$ type 1 active galactic nuclei (AGNs). We use available CO observations to demonstrate that the combination of nebular dust…
I discuss the formation of alpha-enhanced metal-rich stellar populations in the nuclei of luminous ellipticals. Based on hierarchical clustering, different galaxy formation scenarios, which imply different star formation histories, are…
It is still a matter of intense debate how supermassive black holes (SMBH) grow, and the role played by feedback from active galactic nuclei (AGN) in the co-evolution of SMBHs and galaxies. To test the coevolution proposed by theoretical…
We show that feedback from active galactic nuclei (AGN) plays an essential role in reproducing the down-sizing phenomena, namely: the colour-magnitude relation; specific star formation rates; and the $\alpha$ enhancement of early type…
We develop a model for the outer gravitationally unstable regions of accretion disks around massive black holes, for primeval or solar abundances. First we study star formation and evolution in a purely gaseous marginally unstable disk, and…
Energy feedback, either from active galactic nuclei (AGN) or from supernovae, is required to understand galaxy formation within a $\Lambda$-Cold Dark Matter cosmology. We study a sample of 127 low-mass galaxies, comparing their stellar…
Elliptical galaxies probably host the most metal rich stellar populations in the Universe. The processes leading to both the formation and the evolution of such stars are discussed by means of a new multi-zone photo-chemical evolution…
We propose a scenario for mass evolution of massive black holes (MBH) in galactic nuclei, to explain both the mass correlation of the supermassive black hole (SMBH) with the bulge and the down-sizing behavior of the active galactic nuclei.…
The growth of supermassive black holes (SMBH) through accretion is accompanied by the release of enormous amounts of energy which can either be radiated away, as happens in quasars, advected into the black hole, or disposed of in kinetic…
It has always been believed that feedback from active galactic nuclei (AGN) has an important impact on star formation in massive galaxies. Black hole spin is an important physical parameter of AGN. We use a large sample of massive…
Detailed high-resolution observations of the innermost regions of nearby galaxies have revealed the presence of supermassive black holes1. These black holes may interact with their host galaxies by means of 'feedback' in the form of energy…
Context. Observations indicate a strong link between star formation and black hole (BH) growth, but some questions remain unanswered: whether both activities are coeval or whether one precedes the other, what their characteristic timescales…
Galaxy mergers are capable of triggering both star formation and active galactic nuclei (AGN) and therefore may represent an important pathway in the co-evolution of galaxies and supermassive black holes (SMBHs). However, correlated…
The chemical enrichment and stellar abundance ratios of galaxies which form in a hierarchical clustering scheme are calculated. For this purpose I adopt the star formation histories (SFH) as they are delivered by semi-analytic models in…