Related papers: Securing Fuel for Our Frigid Cosmic Future
For most of their lives, galaxies are surrounded by large and massive coronae of hot gas, which constitute vast reservoirs for gas accretion. This Chapter describes a mechanism that allows star-forming disc galaxies to extract gas from…
The discovery of a population of young galaxies at an epoch when the universe was about one tenth of its current age has shed new light on the question of when and how galaxies formed. Within the context of popular models this is the…
In the hierarchical scenario of structure formation, galaxy clusters are the ultimate virialised products in mass and time. Hot baryons in the intracluster medium (ICM) and cold baryons in galaxies inhabit a dark matter dominated halo.…
The most successful cosmological models to date envision structure formation as a hierarchical process in which gravity is constantly drawing lumps of matter together to form increasingly larger structures. Clusters of galaxies currently…
The high-density environment of galaxy clusters is ripe for collisional encounters of galaxies. While the large velocity dispersion of clusters was originally thought to preclude slow encounters, the infall of smaller groups into the…
Many, if not all, galaxies host massive compact objects at their centers. They are present as singularities (super massive black holes) or high density star clusters (nuclear tar clusters). In some cases they coexist, and interact more or…
Clusters of galaxies, the largest collapsed structures in the Universe, are located at the intersection of extended filaments of baryons and dark matter. Cosmological accretion onto clusters through large scale filaments adds material at…
Galaxies must form and evolve via the acquisition of gas from the intergalactic environment, however the way this gas accretion takes place is still poorly understood. Star-forming galaxies are surrounded by multiphase halos that appear to…
Galaxies represent the visible fabric of the Universe and there has been considerable progress recently in both observational and theoretical studies. The underlying goal is to understand the present-day diversity of galaxy forms, masses…
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…
At the present epoch, clusters of galaxies are known to be a hostile environment for emission-line galaxies, which are more commonly found in low density regions outside of clusters. In contrast, going to higher redshifts the population of…
Large self-gravitating stellar systems share with correlated liquids in condensed matter physics a pattern of hierarchical density variations. While it takes the microscopic time resolution to discern the correlated dynamics of the critical…
Mergers of gas-rich galaxies lead to gravitationally driven increases in gas pressure that can trigger intense bursts of star and cluster formation. Although star formation itself is clustered, most newborn stellar aggregates are unbound…
Rich clusters of galaxies are the most massive virialized systems known. Even though they contain only a small fraction of all galaxies, rich clusters provide a powerful tool for the study of galaxy formation, dark matter, large-scale…
The bulk of cosmic matter resides in a dilute reservoir that fills the space between galaxies, the intergalactic medium (IGM). The history of this reservoir is intimately tied to the cosmic histories of structure formation, star formation,…
Future prospects in observational galaxy evolution are reviewed from a personal perspective. New insights will especially come from high-redshift integral field kinematic data and similar low-redshift observations in very large and…
Massive galaxies, such as nearby ellipticals, have relatively low number densities, yet they host the majority of the stellar mass in the universe. Understanding their origin is a central problem of galaxy formation. Age dating of stellar…
Civilization cannot sustain an exponential growth for long time even when neglecting numerous laws of physics! In this paper, we examine what are fundamental obstacles to long term survival of a civilization and its possibility to colonize…
Globular clusters have long been known to contain large excesses of a variety of objects formed through dynamical processes. The past few years have seen a dramatic increase in our knowledge about these systems.
Cosmic voids are underdense regions filling up most of the volume in the Universe. They are expected to emerge in regions comprising negative initial density fluctuations, and subsequently expand as the matter around them collapses and…