Related papers: Structure, Kinematics, and Chemical Enrichment Pat…
The nearest giant spiral, M31, exhibits a kinematically hot stellar disc, a global star formation episode ~2-4 Gyr ago, and conspicuous substructures in its stellar halo that are suggestive of a recent accretion event. Recent chemodynamical…
Observations reveal a strong structural coupling between bulge and disc in S0 galaxies, which seems difficult to explain if they have formed from supposedly catastrophic events such as major mergers. We face this question by quantifying the…
The internal distribution of heavy elements, in particular the radial metallicity gradient, offers insight into the merging history of galaxies. Using our cosmological, chemodynamical simulations that include both detailed chemical…
We numerically investigate dynamical and chemical properties of star clusters (open and globular clusters, and ``super star clusters'', SSC) formed in interacting/merging galaxies. The investigation is two-fold: (1) large-scale…
The emergence of the disc in our Galaxy and the relation of the thick and thin disc formation and evolution is still a matter of debate. The chemo-dynamical characterization of disc stars is key to resolve this question, in particular at…
In hierarchical structure formation, merging of galaxies is frequent and known to dramatically affect their properties. To comprehend these interactions high-resolution simulations are indispensable because of the nonlinear coupling between…
The formation of thick stellar disks in spiral galaxies is studied. Simulations of gas-rich young galaxies show formation of internal clumps by gravitational instabilities, clump coalescence into a bulge, and disk thickening by strong…
The majority of galaxy mergers are expected to be minor mergers. The observational signatures of minor mergers are not well understood, thus there exist few constraints on the minor merger rate. This paper seeks to address this gap in our…
Recent results comparing interacting galaxies to the mass-metallicity relation show that their nuclear oxygen abundances are unexpectedly low. We present analysis of N-body/SPH numerical simulations of equal-mass mergers that confirm the…
(Abridged) We review the results of the first multi-scale, hydrodynamical simulations of mergers between galaxies with central supermassive black holes (SMBHs) to investigate the formation of SMBH binaries in galactic nuclei. We demonstrate…
We study the formation of early-type galaxies through mergers with a sample of 70 high-resolution (softening length < 60 pc and 12*10^6 particles) numerical simulations of binary mergers of disc galaxies and 16 simulations of ETG remergers.…
Radial migration and dynamical heating redistribute stars within galactic discs and thereby modify the chemo-kinematic structure of their host galaxies. Usually, these secular processes are studied in N-body and hydrodynamical simulations…
The detection of GW230529_181500 suggested the existence of more symmetric black hole-neutron star mergers where the black hole mass can be as low as 2.6 times that of the neutron star. Black hole-neutron star binaries with even more…
We study the star-disc interaction in the presence of the strong magnetic field ($B_\star=6.2kG$) of a slowly rotating star. This situation describes a post-merger of the spectral type B and has not been previously investigated. We perform…
We trace the evolution of eight edge-on star-forming disk galaxies by analyzing stellar population properties of their thin and thick disks. These galaxies have relatively low stellar masses (4~$\times$~10$^9$ to…
The $([\alpha/{\rm Fe}],[{\rm Fe/H}])$ distribution of Milky Way stars shows at least two distinct sequences, which have traditionally been associated with the thin and thick disc components. The abundance distribution varies systematically…
Understanding the details of how the red sequence is built is a key question in galaxy evolution. What are the relative roles of gas-rich vs. dry mergers, major vs. minor mergers or galaxy mergers vs. gas accretion? In Wild et al. 2009 we…
The abundances of iron and oxygen are homogeneously determined in a sample of 523 nearby (d<150 pc) FGK disk and halo stars with metallicities in the range -1.5<[Fe/H]<0.5. The oxygen abundances were inferred from a restricted non-LTE…
A scenario for the formation of the bi-modality in the chemical space [$\alpha$/Fe] vs [Fe/H] of the Milky Way was recently proposed in which $\alpha$-enhanced stars are produced early and quickly in clumps. Besides accelerating the…
We predict, analytically and by simulations, that gas discs tend to survive only in haloes above a threshold mass $\sim 2 \times 10^{11} M_\odot$ (stellar mass $\sim 10^9 M_\odot$), with only a weak redshift dependence. At lower masses, the…