Related papers: Gas circulation and galaxy evolution
We explore the gravitational influence of pressure supported stellar systems on the internal density distribution of a gaseous environment. We conclude that compact massive star clusters with masses >= 10^6 M_sun act as cloud condensation…
Stars and star clusters form by gravoturbulent fragmentation of interstellar gas clouds. The supersonic turbulence ubiquitously observed in Galactic molecular gas generates strong density fluctuations with gravity taking over in the densest…
Galaxy interactions/mergers, gravitational instabilities and density waves, such as bars, are frequently invoked to trigger starbursts. These mechanisms have been explored through numerical simulations, with the help of various star…
Galaxy evolution depends strongly on the environment. Dynamical interactions and subsequent evolution make galaxies more concentrated, with higher surface densities, and also trigger star-formation, which consumes the available cold gas.…
Spiral galaxies must acquire gas to maintain their observed level of star formation beyond the next few billion years (Leroy et al. 2008). A source of this material may be the gas that resides between galaxies, but our understanding of the…
The main requirements for fueling an active galactic nucleus and to form massive black holes are reviewed. Low-luminosity AGN can be fueled easily from the local star clusters, near the nucleus, and the various stellar processes are…
The star formation history of galaxies is a complex process usually considered to be stochastic in nature, for which we can only give average descriptions such as the color-density relation. In this work we follow star-forming gas particles…
The distribution of gravitational torques and bar strengths in the local Universe is derived from a detailed study of 163 galaxies observed in the near-infrared. The results are compared with numerical models for spiral galaxy evolution. It…
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…
Galaxies are expected to accrete pristine gas from their surroundings to sustain their star formation over cosmic timescales. Its lower abundance affects the metallicity of the ISM in which stars are born, leaving chemical imprints in the…
Formation process(es) of galactic bulges are not yet clarified although several mechanisms have been proposed. In a previous study, we suggested one possibility that galactic bulges have been formed from the cold gas inflowing through…
We present evidence that the accretion of warm gas onto the Galaxy today is at least as important as cold gas accretion. For more than a decade, the source of the bright H-alpha emission (up to 750 mR) along the Magellanic Stream has…
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…
We study the formation of disks via the cooling flow of gas within galactic haloes using smoothed particle hydrodynamics simulations. These simulations resolve mass scales of a few thousand solar masses in the gas component for the first…
Substantial numbers of morphologically regular early-type (elliptical and lenticular) galaxies contain molecular gas, and the quantities of gas are probably sufficient to explain recent estimates of the current level of star formation…
Major progress has been made over the last few years in understanding hydrodynamical processes on cosmological scales, in particular how galaxies get their baryons. There is increasing recognition that a large part of the baryons accrete…
When and how did galaxies form and their metals accumulate? Over the last decade, this has moved from an archeological question to a live investigation: there is now a broad picture of the evolution of galaxies in dark matter halos: their…
We present results from high--resolution cosmological hydrodynamical simulations of a Milky--Way-sized halo, aimed at studying the effect of feedback on the nature of gas accretion. Simulations include a model of inter-stellar medium and…
Galaxies accrete their mass by means of both smooth accretion from the cosmic web, and the mergers of smaller entities. We wish to quantify the respective role of these two modes of accretion, which could determine the morphological types…
Competitive accretion, a process to explain the origin of the IMF, occurs when stars in a common gravitational potential accrete from a distributed gaseous component. We show that concerns recently raised on the efficiency of competitive…