Related papers: Unveiling Galaxy Interactions: Watching the Tides …
HI observations have revealed large gaseous extensions in interacting and merging systems. The interstellar gas is obviously dragged out in tidal tails during an encounter, and the percentage of HI in the tails increases with the merging…
The star formation history of a galaxy, explicitely here our Milky Way Galaxy, where the most detailed information is attainable, is the convolution of two functions. One function describes the rate of formation of the stars which are today…
Can the present dynamics of spiral galaxies tell us something about the merging history, the formation and evolution of disks? Galaxy interactions thicken or destroy disks; the simultaneous presence of thick and thin disks is a tracer of…
Stars and their exoplanets evolve together. Depending on the physical characteristics of these systems, such as age, orbital distance and activity of the host stars, certain types of star-exoplanet interactions can dominate during given…
Advances on the formation and survival of the so-called Tidal Dwarf Galaxies (TDGs) are reviewed. The understanding on how objects of the mass of dwarf galaxies may form in debris of galactic collisions has recently benefited from the…
An introduction is given to projects investigating galaxy evolution quantitatively by spectroscopic observations of very distant galaxies that have weak apparent brightnesses and small sizes as it is feasible with 10m-class telescopes like…
The last 20 years have seen an explosion in our understanding of the large-scale distribution and motions of galaxies in the nearby universe. The field has moved from a largely qualitative, morphological description of the structures seen…
The observable characteristics and subsequent evolution of young stellar populations is dominated by their massive stars. As our understanding of those massive stars and the factors affecting their evolution improves, so our interpretation…
Interactions between galaxies are suggested to be a mechanism responsible for feeding Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN). Theoretical models show that interactions are an efficient way to drive gas from the galaxy to the nucleus, however, the…
(Abridged) In these lectures aimed for non-specialists, I review progress in understanding how galaxies form and evolve. Both the star formation history and assembly of stellar mass can be empirically traced from redshifts z~6 to the…
The chemical abundances in the atmosphere of a star provide unique information about the gas from which that star formed, and, modulo processes that are not important for the vast majority of stars, such as mass transfer in close binary…
The Thesis is an attempt to combine data from three previously independent areas - the structure and kinematics of stellar populations of the Galaxy, photometric and dynamical models of galaxies, and models of the dynamical and physical…
Galaxies evolve via a complex interaction of numerous different physical processes, scales and components. In spite of this, overall trends often appear. Simplified models for galaxy histories can be used to search for and capture such…
We explore the mass-assembly and chemical enrichment histories of star forming galaxies by applying a population synthesis method to a sample of 84828 galaxies from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey Data Release 5. Our method decomposes the…
Galaxy interaction and merging have clear effects on the systems involved. We find an increase in the star formation rate (SFR), potential ignition of active galactic nuclei (AGN) and significant morphology changes. However, at what stage…
We extract from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey a sample of 347 systems involving early type galaxies separated by less than 30 kpc, in projection, and 500 km/s in radial velocity. These close pairs are likely progenitors of dry mergers. The…
Galactic spheroids can form as a result of galaxy interactions and mergers of disks. Detailed analyses of the photometric properties, the intrinsic orbital structure, the line-of-sight velocity distributions and the kinemetry of simulated…
We have used a large sample of low-inclination spiral galaxies with radially-resolved optical and near-infrared photometry to investigate trends in star formation history with radius as a function of galaxy structural parameters. A maximum…
In this review, we present a brief description of observational efforts to understand the Galactic thick disk and its relation to the other Galactic components. This review primarily focused on elemental abundance patterns of the thick disk…
Approximately half of all disc galaxies exhibit appreciable warps in both their stellar and HI discs. The typical warp amplitude is small (a few degrees), and only becomes noticeable at the periphery of the galaxy disc. As a result, warps…