Related papers: Particle tagging and its implications for stellar …
The growth and properties of galaxies are thought to be closely connected to the ones of their host dark matter halos. Despite the importance of this so-called galaxy-halo connection, the potential role of dark matter halos in regulating…
We use cosmological hydrodynamical simulations of Milky-Way-mass galaxies from the FIRE project to evaluate various strategies for estimating the mass of a galaxy's stellar halo from deep, integrated-light images. We find good agreement…
Tidal debris streams from galaxy satellites can provide insight into the dark matter distribution in halos. This is because we have more information about stars in a debris structure than about a purely random population of stars: we know…
Stellar halos may hold some of the best preserved fossils of the formation history of galaxies. They are a natural product of the merging processes that probably take place during the assembly of a galaxy, and hence may well be the most…
It is now well-established that the elemental abundance patterns of stars holds key clues not only to their formation but also to the assembly histories of galaxies. One of the most exciting possibilities is the use of stellar abundance…
In this work, I explore an empirically motivated model for investigating the relationship between galaxy stellar masses, star formation rates and their halo masses and mass accretion histories. The core statistical quantity in this model is…
Galactic dynamical structures are fossil records of the assembly histories of galaxies. By analyzing the cosmological hydrodynamical simulation TNG50, we find that a dynamical structure that we call the "hot inner stellar halo," defined by…
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 have developed a method for fast and accurate stellar population parameters determination in order to apply it to high resolution galaxy spectra. The method is based on an optimization technique that combines active learning with an…
The inference of the Milky Way halo mass requires modelling the phase space structure of dynamical tracers, with different tracers following different models and having different levels of sensitivity to the halo mass. For steady-state…
The limits of available computing power have forced models for the structure of stellar halos to adopt one or both of the following simplifying assumptions: (1) stellar mass can be "painted" onto dark matter particles in progenitor…
Since the early 1970s, stellar population modelling has been one of the basic tools for understanding the physics of unresolved systems from observation of their integrated light. Models allow us to relate the integrated spectra (or…
Using hydrodynamical simulations, we study how well the underlying gravitational potential of a galaxy cluster can be modelled dynamically with different types of tracers. In order to segregate different systematics and the effects of…
The hierarchical model of galaxy formation predicts that the Milky Way halo is populated by tidal debris of dwarf galaxies and globular clusters. Due to long dynamical times, debris from the lowest mass objects remains coherent as thin and…
We describe a novel method for determining the demographics of a population of star clusters, for example distributions of cluster mass and age, from unresolved photometry. This method has a number of desirable properties: it fully exploits…
Understanding the star-formation properties of galaxies as a function of cosmic epoch is a critical exercise in studies of galaxy evolution. Traditionally, stellar population synthesis models have been used to obtain best fit parameters…
The galaxy distribution in dark matter-dominated halos is expected to approximately trace the details of the underlying dark matter substructure. In this paper we introduce halo `core-tracking' as a way to efficiently follow the small-scale…
We use simple analytic reasoning to identify physical processes that drive the evolution of the cosmic star formation density in cold dark matter universes. Based on our analysis, we formulate a model to characterise the redshift dependence…
Using a sample of 126000 late-type galaxies from the SDSS, we analyzed stellar mass as a function of the dynamical mass. Stellar masses are estimated using eight stellar population synthesis (SPS) models with constant IMF, while dynamical…
This paper shows that gravitating bodies travelling through the Galaxy can trap lighter interstellar particles that pass nearby with small relative velocities onto temporarily-bound orbits. The capture mechanism is driven by the Galactic…