Related papers: The Dual Origin of Stellar Halos
We study the formation of fifty-three galaxy cluster-size dark matter halos formed within a pair of cosmological LCDM N-body simulations, and track the accretion histories of cluster subhalos with masses large enough to host 0.1L* galaxies.…
We use the ``Via Lactea'' simulation to study the co-evolution of a Milky Way-size LambdaCDM halo and its subhalo population. While most of the host halo mass is accreted over the first 6 Gyr in a series of major mergers, the physical mass…
We analyze the formation and evolution of the stellar components in "Eris", a 120 pc-resolution cosmological hydrodynamic simulation of a late-type spiral galaxy. The simulation includes the effects of a uniform UV background, a…
Our Galaxy is thought to have undergone an active evolutionary history dominated by star formation, the accretion of cold gas, and, in particular, mergers up to 10 gigayear ago. The stellar halo reveals rich fossil evidence of these…
Properties of galaxies vary systematically with the mass of their parent dark matter halos. This basic galaxy - halo connection shows a fair amount of scatter whose origin is not fully understood. Here, we study how differences in the halo…
We study the population of satellite galaxies formed in a suite of N-body/gasdynamical simulations of galaxy formation in a LCDM universe. We find little spatial or kinematic bias between the dark matter and the satellite population. The…
The `core-cusp' problem is considered a key challenge to the LCDM paradigm. Halos in dark matter only simulations exhibit `cuspy' profiles, where density continuously increases towards the centre. However, the dark matter profiles of many…
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 present the McMaster Unbiased Galaxy Simulations (MUGS), the first 9 galaxies of an unbiased selection ranging in total mass from 5$\times10^{11}$ M$_\odot$ to 2$\times10^{12}$ M$_\odot$ simulated using n-body smoothed particle…
Understanding the physical processes that drive star formation is a key challenge for galaxy formation models. In this article we study the tight correlation between the star formation rate (SFR) and stellar mass of galaxies at a given…
Since the chemical abundances of stars are the fossil records of the physical conditions in galaxies, they provide the key information for recovering the assembly history of galaxies. In this work, we explore the chemo-chrono-kinematics of…
We use the Phoenix simulations to study the mass assembly history and internal structures of cluster dark matter haloes ($M_{200} \gtrsim 5\times 10^{14} h^{-1}{\rm M}_\odot$). We confirm that cluster haloes grow inside-out, similar to…
Galaxies are believed to be in one-to-one correspondence with simulated dark matter subhalos. We use high-resolution N-body simulations of cosmological volumes to calculate the statistical properties of subhalo (galaxy) major mergers at…
To break the degeneracy among galactic stellar components, we extract kinematic structures using the framework described in Du et al. (2019, 2020). For example, the concept of stellar halos is generalized to weakly-rotating structures that…
We examine metallicities, ages and orbital properties of halo stars in a Milky-Way like disk galaxy formed in the cosmological hydrodynamical MaGICC simulations. Halo stars were either accreted from satellites or they formed in situ in the…
We use FIRE-2 cosmological zoom-in hydrodynamic simulations to investigate the co-evolution between Milky Way-size galaxies and their host dark matter halos. We find that the formation of these galaxies follows a two-phase pattern, with an…
We study the detailed structure of galaxies at redshifts z > 2 using cosmological simulations with improved modeling of the interstellar medium and star formation. The simulations follow the formation and dissociation of molecular hydrogen,…
The formation of disk galaxies is one of the most outstanding problems in modern astrophysics and cosmology. We review the progress made by numerical simulations carried out on large parallel supercomputers. Recent progress stems from a…
We analyse the kinematics and chemistry of the bulge stars of two simulated disc galaxies using our chemodynamical galaxy evolution code GCD+. First we compare stars that are born inside the galaxy with those that are born outside the…
We present a comprehensive study of the chemical properties of the stellar haloes of Milky-Way mass galaxies, analysing the transition between the inner to the outer haloes. We find the transition radius between the relative dominance of…