Related papers: The Role of Dwarf Galaxies in Building Large Stell…
Dwarf galaxies are known to have remarkably low star formation efficiency due to strong feedback. Adopting the dwarf galaxies of the Milky Way as a laboratory, we explore a flexible semi-analytic galaxy formation model to understand how the…
Studying our Galaxy, the Milky Way (MW), gives us a close-up view of the interplay between cosmology, dark matter, and galaxy formation. In the next decade our understanding of the MW's dynamics, stellar populations, and structure will…
Modern theories of galaxy formation predict that the Galactic stellar halo was hierarchically assembled from the accretion and disruption of smaller systems. This hierarchical assembly is expected to produce a high degree of structure in…
Detailed studies of stellar populations in the halos of the Milky Way and the Andromeda (M 31) galaxies have shown increasing numbers of tidal streams and dwarf galaxies, attesting to a complicated and on-going process of hierarchical…
In the standard Lambda-CDM paradigm, dwarf galaxies are expected to be dark-matter-rich, as baryonic feedback is thought to quickly drive gas out of their shallow potential wells and quench star formation at early epochs. Recent…
We study how structural properties of globular clusters and dwarf galaxies are linked to their orbits in the Milky Way halo. From the inner to the outer halo, orbital energy increases and stellar-systems gradually move out of internal…
Theories of how galaxies, the fundamental constituents of large-scale structure, form and evolve have undergone a dramatic paradigm shift in the last few decades. Earlier views were of rapid, early collapse and formation of basic…
According to the hierarchical clustering scenario, galaxies like the Milky Way form hierarchically, and many supporting evidences have been found in the Galactic halo. However, most stars in the Milky Way are disk stars. Disk stars have…
[Abridged] Motivated by upcoming data from astrometric and spectroscopic surveys of the Galaxy, we explore the chemical abundance properties and phase-space distributions in hierarchically-formed stellar halo simulations set in a LambdaCDM…
It has been proposed that mergers induce starbursts and lead to important morphological changes in galaxies. Most studies so far have focused on large galaxies, but dwarfs might also experience such events, since the halo mass function is…
We have developed a new semi-analytic model for the formation and evolution of structure on galaxy, group and cluster scales. The model combines merger trees with a detailed, spatially resolved description of the dynamical evolution of halo…
We investigate the chemical properties of local galaxies within a cosmological framework in the hierarchical picture of galaxy formation. To this aim, we use a hierarchical semi-analytic model which includes the contribution from (i) low…
We summarize evidence that the halo of the Milky Way comprises two different, and broadly overlapping, stellar components. The two structures exhibit different chemical compositions, spatial distributions, and kinematics. These results were…
Hierarchical structure formation theory is based on the notion that mergers drive galaxy evolution, so a considerable framework of semi-analytic models and N-body simulations has been constructed to calculate how mergers transform a growing…
We study the formation of the Milky Way's halo in a $\Lambda$CDM cosmology by scaling down a high resolution simulation of the formation of a cluster of galaxies. We determine how much phase-space substructure is left over from the objects…
We use a cosmological galactic evolutionary approach to model the Milky Way. A detailed treatment of the mass aggregation and dynamical history of the growing dark halo is included, together with a self consistent physical treatment for the…
Context: Dwarf galaxies can arise from self-gravitating structures emerging from tidal tails. What fraction of the known dwarf galaxies in the Local Universe can have this origin is still a matter of debate. Aims: In our effort to…
Stellar population studies show that low mass galaxies in all environments exhibit stellar halos that are older and more spherically distributed than the main body of the galaxy. In some cases, there is a significant intermediate age…
In this contribution we discuss the expected properties of our halo if our Galaxy had been built from mergers of smaller systems. Using both analytic arguments and high-resolution simulations, we find that the Galactic halo in the Solar…
The determination of chemical abundances in star-forming galaxies and the study of their evolution on cosmological timescales are powerful tools for understanding galaxy formation and evolution. This contribution presents the latest results…