Related papers: Stellar mass map and dark matter distribution in M…
Models of galaxy formation in a cosmological context predict that massive disk galaxies should have structured extended stellar halos. Recent studies in integrated light, however, report a few galaxies, including the nearby disk galaxy…
We develop an analytic halo model for the distribution of dust around galaxies. The model results are compared with the observed surface dust density profile measured through reddening of background quasars in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey…
We present the first results from our survey of stellar substructure in the outskirts of M31 using the Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) on board the Hubble Space Telescope. We discuss the stellar populations associated with five prominent…
The existence of stellar halos around galaxies is a natural prediction of the hierarchical nature of the LambdaCDM model. Recent observations of Milky Way-like galaxies have revealed a wide range in stellar halo mass, including cases with…
We use new Herschel multi-band imaging of the Andromeda galaxy to analyze how dust heating occurs in the central regions of galaxy spheroids that are essentially devoid of young stars. We construct a dust temperature map of M31 through…
We map the dust distribution in the central 180" (~680 pc) region of the M31 bulge, based on HST/WFC3 and ACS observations in ten bands from near-ultraviolet (2700 A) to near-infrared (1.5 micron). This large wavelength coverage gives us…
We use deep Hubble Space Telescope imaging in the outskirts of the nearby spiral M101 to study stellar populations in the galaxy's outer disk and halo. Our ACS field lies 17.6 arcmin (36 kpc) from the center of M101 and targets the blue "NE…
We present the results of a wide-field (V,I) photometric study of the red-giant branch (RGB) stars in the outer halo of M31, in a field located 30 to 35 kpc from the center of the galaxy along the southeast minor axis. At this remote…
We model the mass distributions of 40 high surface brightness spiral galaxies inside their optical radii, deriving parameters of mass models by matching the predicted velocities to observed velocity maps. We use constant mass-to-light disk…
We have conducted a wide-field CCD-mosaic study of the resolved red-giant branch (RGB) stars of M31, in a field located 20 kpc from the nucleus along the SE minor axis. In our (I, V-I) color-magnitude diagram, RGB stars in the top three…
Numerical simulations of galaxy formation within the cold dark matter (CDM) hierarchical clustering framework are unable to produce large disk galaxies without invoking some form of feedback to suppress gas cooling and collapse to a…
We obtain a new determination of the metallicity distribution function (MDF) of stars within $\sim5$-$10$ kpc of the Sun, based on recently improved co-adds of $ugriz$ photometry for Stripe 82 from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. Our new…
In this empirical work, we aim to quantify the systematic uncertainties in stellar mass $(M_\star)$ estimates made from spectral energy distribution (SED) fitting through stellar population synthesis (SPS), for galaxies in the local…
All measurements of cosmic star formation must assume an initial distribution of stellar masses -- the stellar initial mass function -- in order to extrapolate from the star-formation rate measured for typically rare, massive stars (> 8…
The robustness of stellar-dynamical black hole (BH) mass measurements is illustrated using 7 galaxies that have results from independent groups. Derived masses have remained constant to a factor of about 2 as spatial resolution has improved…
We apply the empirical method built for z=0 in the previous work of Wang et al. to a higher redshift, to link galaxy stellar mass directly with its hosting dark matter halo mass at z~0.8. The relation of the galaxy stellar mass and the host…
We use the Illustris Simulations to gain insight into the build-up of the outer, low-surface brightness regions which surround galaxies. We characterize the stellar haloes by means of the logarithmic slope of the spherically-averaged…
Interstellar dust absorbs stellar light very efficiently and thus shapes the energetic output of galaxies. Studying the impact of different stellar populations on the dust heating remains hard because it requires decoupling the relative…
In this paper we review the main and the most recent evidence for the presence of a core radius in the distribution of the dark matter around spiral galaxies. Their rotation curves, coadded according to the galaxy luminosity, conform to an…
We derive a star catalogue generated from the images taken as part of the 37.5 sq. deg Millennium Galaxy Catalogue. These data, alone and together with colours gained from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey Early Data Release, allow the analysis…