Related papers: Particle tagging and its implications for stellar …
Stars play a key role in the evolution of the Universe, as sources of radiation, as dynamical engines, and as chemical factories. Outputs of stellar models are then central to various studies in astrophysics. Stellar physics links…
Cosmological hydrodynamical simulations are studied in order to analyse generic trends for the stellar, baryonic and halo mass assembly of low-mass galaxies (M_* < 3 x 10^10 M_sun) as a function of their present halo mass, in the context of…
The evolution of galaxies is driven strongly by dynamical processes including internal instabilities, tidal interactions and mergers. The cluster environment is a useful laboratory for studying these effects. I present recent results on…
We investigate the chemical and kinematic properties of the diffuse stellar haloes of six simulated Milky Way-like galaxies from the Aquarius Project. Binding energy criteria are adopted to defined two dynamically distinct stellar…
We quantify the systematic effects on the stellar mass function which arise from assumptions about the stellar population, as well as how one fits the light profiles of the most luminous galaxies at z ~ 0.1. When comparing results from the…
Understanding the connections between galaxy stellar mass, star formation rate, and dark matter halo mass represents a key goal of the theory of galaxy formation. Cosmological simulations that include hydrodynamics, physical treatments of…
We have developed a simple yet surprisingly accurate analytic scheme for tracking the dynamical evolution of substructure within larger dark halos. The scheme incorporates the effects of dynamical friction, tidal mass loss and tidal heating…
We use a cosmological galactic evolutionary approach to model the Milky Way. A detailed treatment of the mass aggregation and dynamical history of the growing dark halo is included, together with a self consistent physical treatment for the…
If the stellar halos of disk galaxies are built up from the disruption of dwarf galaxies, models predict highly structured variations in the stellar populations within these halos. We test this prediction by studying the ratio of blue…
Stellar dynamics is almost unreasonably well suited for an implementation in terms of special-purpose hardware. Unlike the case of molecular dynamics, stellar dynamics deals exclusively with a long-range force, gravity, which leads to a…
The relations between star formation and properties of molecular clouds are studied based on a sample of star forming regions in the Galactic Plane. Sources were selected by having radio recombination lines to provide identification of…
The last decade has seen enormous progress in understanding the structure of the Milky Way and neighboring galaxies via the production of large-scale digital surveys of the sky like 2MASS and SDSS, as well as specialized, counterpart…
The empirical model of Lu et al. 2014 is updated with recent data and used to study galaxy star formation and assembly histories. At $z > 2$, the predicted galaxy stellar mass functions are steep, and a significant amount of star formation…
According to the now strongly supported concordance $\Lambda$CDM model, galaxies may be grossly described as a luminous component embedded in a dark matter halo. The density profile of these mass dominating haloes may be determined by N -…
(abridged) This thesis presents theoretical and statistical techniques broadly related to systems of dynamically-interacting particles composed of several different types of populations. They are applied to observations of dense star…
One of the key factors influencing galaxy clustering in the nonlinear regime is galaxy assembly bias, which describes the dependence of galaxy clustering on halo properties beyond halo mass. We study this effect by analyzing galaxy samples…
In this work we focus on the determination of the relative distributions of young, intermediate-age and old populations of stars in galaxies. Starting from a grid of theoretical population synthesis models we constructed a set of model…
Cosmological galaxy formation simulations are still limited by their spatial/mass resolution and cannot model from first principles some of the processes, like star formation, that are key in driving galaxy evolution. As a consequence they…
Stellar streams that emerge from globular clusters (GCs) are thin stellar structures spread along the orbits of progenitor clusters. Numerical modeling of these streams is essential for understanding their interaction with the host galaxy's…
The condensation of gas and stars in the inner regions of dark matter halos leads to a more concentrated dark matter distribution. While this effect is based on simple gravitational physics, the question of its validity in hierarchical…