Related papers: Early assembly of the most massive galaxies
The current consensus on the formation and evolution of the brightest cluster galaxies is that their stellar mass forms early ($z \gtrsim 4$) in separate galaxies that then eventually assemble the main structure at late times ($z \lesssim…
Most clusters and groups of galaxies contain a giant elliptical galaxy in their centres which far outshines and outweighs normal ellipticals. The origin of these brightest cluster galaxies is intimately related to the collapse and formation…
According to the current understanding of cosmic structure formation, the precursors of the most massive structures in the Universe began to form shortly after the Big Bang, in regions corresponding to the largest fluctuations in the cosmic…
Understanding the formation history of brightest cluster galaxies is an important topic in galaxy formation. Utilizing the Planck Sunyaev-Zel'dovich cluster catalog, and applying the Ansatz that the most massive halos at one redshift remain…
A number of years ago the estimates of astronomers and astrophysicists were that the earliest galaxies took about 2.5 to 3 billion years to form, that is, that they did not appear until 2.5 to 3 billion years after the Big Bang. Those…
We use semi-analytic techniques to study the formation and evolution of brightest cluster galaxies (BCGs). We show the extreme hierarchical nature of these objects and discuss the limits of simple ways to capture their evolution. In a model…
The most massive galaxies in the present-day Universe are found to lie in the centres of rich clusters. They have old, coeval stellar populations suggesting that the bulk of their stars must have formed at early epochs in spectacular…
The empirical model of Lu et al. 2014 is updated with recent data and used to study galaxy star formation and assembly histories. At $z > 2$, the predicted galaxy stellar mass functions are steep, and a significant amount of star formation…
A galaxy's orientation is one of its most basic observable properties. Astronomers once assumed that galaxies are randomly oriented in space, however it is now clear that some have preferred orientations with respect to their surroundings.…
Hierarchical galaxy formation is the model whereby massive galaxies form from an assembly of smaller units. The most massive objects therefore form last. The model succeeds in describing the clustering of galaxies, but the evolutionary…
Understanding the formation history of massive galaxies is one of most popular and longstanding problems in astronomy, with observations and theory addressing how and when these systems assembled. Since the most massive galaxies in today's…
Massive clusters of galaxies have been found as early as 3.9 Billion years (z=1.62) after the Big Bang containing stars that formed at even earlier epochs. Cosmological simulations using the current cold dark matter paradigm predict these…
The discovery of a population of young galaxies at an epoch when the universe was about one tenth of its current age has shed new light on the question of when and how galaxies formed. Within the context of popular models this is the…
We present multi-wavelength observations of the brightest galaxies in four X-ray luminous groups at z~0.37 that will merge to form a cluster comparable in mass to Coma. Ordered by increasing stellar mass, the four brightest group galaxies…
Combined HST, X-ray, and ground-based optical studies show that clusters of galaxies are largely "in place" by $z \sim 1$, an epoch when the Universe was less than half its present age. High resolution images show that elliptical, S0, and…
[Abridged] Over the past two decades observations and theoretical simulations have established a global frame-work of galaxy formation and evolution in the young Universe. Galaxies formed as baryonic gas cooled at the centres of collapsing…
Rest-frame optical observations with the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) have uncovered a population of massive galaxies, exceeding $10^{10}$ solar masses, present less than a billion years after the Big Bang. The large stellar masses of…
The concept that stars form in the modern era began some 60 years ago with the key observation of expanding OB associations. Now we see that these associations are an intermediate scale in a cascade of hierarchical structures that begins on…
The formation of galaxies by gradual hierarchical co-assembly of baryons and cold dark matter halos is a fundamental paradigm underpinning modern astrophysics and predicts a strong decline in the number of massive galaxies at early cosmic…
In a Lambda CDM Universe, galaxies grow in mass both through star formation and through addition of already-formed stars in galaxy mergers. Because of this partial decoupling of these two modes of galaxy growth, I discuss each separately in…