Related papers: Galaxy Masses
I present mass functions of actively accreting black holes detected in different quasar surveys which in concert cover a wide range of cosmic history. I briefly address what we learn from these mass functions. I summarize the motivation for…
Low-mass stars play a key role in many different areas of astrophysics. In this article, I provide a brief overview of the evolution of low-mass stars, and discuss some of the uncertainties and problems currently affecting low-mass stellar…
I present a brief review of the stellar population properties of massive galaxies, focusing on early-type galaxies in particular, with emphasis on recent results from the ATLAS3D Survey. I discuss the occurrence of young stellar ages, cold…
Black holes are a common feature of the Universe. They are observed as stellar mass black holes spread throughout galaxies and as supermassive objects in their centres. Observations of stars orbiting close to the centre of our Galaxy…
Planetary nebula are useful kinematic tracers of the stars in all galaxy types. I review recent observationally-driven developments in the study of galaxy mass profiles. These have yielded surprising results on spiral galaxy disk masses and…
We review the current state of dynamical modeling for galaxies in terms of being able to measure both the central black hole mass and stellar orbital structure. Both of these must be known adequately to measure either property. The current…
For 18 well-observed gravitationally lensed QSOs, we compare new non-parametric mass profiles for the lensing galaxies with stellar-population models derived from published HST photometry. The large volume of parameter space searched --…
This paper discusses how cosmic gas accretion controls star formation, and summarizes the physical properties expected for the cosmic gas accreted by galaxies. The paper also collects observational evidence for gas accretion sustaining star…
This review addresses one of the important topics of current astrophysical research, namely the role that supermassive black holes play in shaping the morphology of their host galaxies. There is increasing evidence for the presence of…
Star formation takes place in the dense gas phase, and therefore a simple dense gas and star formation rate relation has been proposed. With the advent of multi-beam receivers, new observations show that the deviation from linear relations…
The ensemble of all star clusters in a galaxy constitutes its star cluster system. In this review, the focus of the discussion is on the ability of star clusters, particularly the systems of old massive globular clusters (GCSs), to mark the…
We show that different stellar-mass estimation methods yield overall mass scales that disagree by factors up to ~2 for the z=0 galaxy population, and more importantly, relative mass scales that sometimes disagree by factors >~3 between…
Gaia is an ambitious ESA space mission which will provide photometric and astrometric measurements with the accuracies needed to produce a kinematic census of almost one billion stars in our Galaxy. These data will revolutionize our…
Compact groups of galaxies have posed a number of challenging questions. Intensive observational and theoretical studies are now providing answers to many of these, and at the same time, are revealing unexpected new clues about the nature…
The different regimes of gravitational lensing constitutes an interesting tool in order to map the mass distribution in galaxy clusters on different scales. In this proceedings article, I review some work I have performed on this topic.…
Spiral galaxies offer a unique opportunity to study the role of star formation in galaxy evolution and to test various theoretical star formation schemes. I review some recent relevant work on the evolution of spiral galaxies. Detailed…
The astronomical dark matter could be made of weakly interacting massive species whose mutual annihilations should produce antimatter particles and distortions in the corresponding energy spectra. The propagation of cosmic rays inside the…
The central problem of galaxy formation is understanding the cooling and condensation of gas in dark matter halos. It is now clear that to match observations this requires further physics than the simple assumptions of single phase gas…
We use a sample of Milky Way (MW) analogs for which we have stellar and disk gas mass measurements, published measurements of halo gas masses of the MW and of similar galaxies, and the well-established value of the cosmological baryon…
Weak gravitational lensing has become an important tool to study the properties of dark matter halos around galaxies, thanks to the advent of large panoramic cameras on 4m class telescopes. This area of research has been developing rapidly…