Related papers: Major Merging: The Way to Make a Massive, Passive …
Cosmic voids, the largest under-dense structures in the Universe, are crucial for exploring galaxy evolution. These vast, sparsely populated regions are home to void galaxies -- predominantly gas-rich, star-forming, and blue -- that evolve…
We investigate the relationship between the quenching of star formation and the structural transformation of massive galaxies, using a large sample of photometrically-selected post-starburst galaxies in the UKIDSS UDS field. We find that…
We present the stellar mass profiles of 147 isolated quiescent galaxies in very low-density environments (i.e., void regions) in the local Universe ($0.01<z<0.06$) from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. These galaxies have stellar masses…
More than half of all stars in the local Universe are found in massive spheroidal galaxies, which are characterized by old stellar populations with little or no current star formation. In present models, such galaxies appear rather late as…
(Abridged) We develop and test a model for the cosmological role of mergers in the formation and quenching of red, early-type galaxies. Making the ansatz that star formation is quenched after a gas-rich, spheroid-forming major merger, we…
According to the standard inside-out galaxy formation scenario, galaxies first form a dense core and then gradually assemble their outskirts. This implies that galaxies with similar central stellar mass densities might have evolutionary…
We use $>$9400 $\log(m/M_{\odot})>10$ quiescent and star-forming galaxies at $z\lesssim2$ in COSMOS/UltraVISTA to study the average size evolution of these systems, with focus on the rare, ultra-massive population at…
Using mass-selected galaxy samples from deep multiwavelength data we investigate the incidence of close galaxy pairs between z=0.4-2. Many such close pairs will eventually merge, and the pair fraction is therefore related to the merger…
The distribution of galaxy morphological types is a key test for models of galaxy formation and evolution, providing strong constraints on the relative contribution of different physical processes responsible for the growth of the…
One key problem in astrophysics is understanding how and why galaxies switch off their star formation, building the quiescent population that we observe in the local Universe. From the GAMA and VIPERS surveys, we use spectroscopic indices…
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…
(Abridged) The bimodality between star-forming discs and quiescent spheroids requires the existence of two main processes: the galaxy quenching and the morphological transformation. In this paper, we aim to understand the link between these…
The massive galaxy population above the characteristic Schechter mass M*~10^10.6 Msun contributes to about half of the total stellar mass in the local Universe. These massive galaxies usually reside in hot dark matter haloes above the…
Galaxy mergers are believed to play a key role in transforming star-forming disk galaxies into quenched ellipticals. Most of our theoretical knowledge about such morphological transformations does, however, rely on idealised simulations…
Multiple, sequential mergers are unavoidable in the hierarchical build-up picture of galaxies, in particular for the minor mergers that are frequent and highly likely to have occured several times for most present-day galaxies. However, the…
We address the formation of massive stellar spheroids between redshifts $z=4$ and 1 using a suite of AMR hydro-cosmological simulations. The spheroids form as bulges, and the spheroid mass growth is partly driven by violent disc instability…
Recent observations of UV-/optically selected, massive star forming galaxies at z~2 indicate that the baryonic mass assembly and star formation history is dominated by continuous rapid accretion of gas and internal secular evolution, rather…
The presence of massive quiescent galaxies at high redshifts is still a challenge for most models of galaxy formation. The aim of this work is to compare the observed number density and properties of these galaxies with the predictions of…
We use the stellar-mass-selected catalog from the Spitzer Large Area Survey with Hyper-Suprime-Cam (SPLASH) in the COSMOS field to study the environments of galaxies via galaxy density and clustering analyses up to $z \sim 2.5$. The…
We calculate the observable properties of the most massive high-redshift galaxies in the hierarchical formation scenario where stellar spheroid and supermassive black hole growth are fueled by gas-rich mergers. Combining high-resolution…