Related papers: The major merger origin of the Andromeda II kinema…
Tens of early type galaxies have been recently reported to possess prolate rotation, i.e. significant amount of rotation around the major axis, including two cases in the Local Group. Although expected theoretically, this phenomenon is…
The Local Group is often seen to be a quiescent environment without significant merger events. However an ancient major merger may have occurred in the most massive galaxy. Numerical simulations have shown that tidal tails formed during…
Prolate rotation is characterized by a significant stellar rotation around a galaxy's major axis, which contrasts with the more common oblate rotation. Prolate rotation is thought to be due to major mergers and thus studies of…
Kinematical and morphological features observed in early-type galaxies provide valuable insights into the evolution of their hosts. We studied the origin of prolate rotation (i.e., rotation around the long axis) in Illustris large-scale…
The thin, extended planes of satellite galaxies detected around both the Milky Way and Andromeda are not a natural prediction of the LCDM paradigm. Galaxies in these distinct planes may have formed and evolved in a different way (e.g.,…
There are two fundamentally different physical origins of faint satellite galaxies: cosmological sub-structures that contain shining baryons and the fragmentation of gas-rich tidal arms thrown out from interacting galaxies during…
The dwarf spheroidal (dSph) satellites of the Local Group have long been thought to be simple spheroids of stars embedded within extended dark matter halos. Recently, however, evidence for the presence of spatially and kinematically…
Our current knowledge of M31's dwarf spheroidal companions is reviewed. Two topics of recent interest constitute the bulk of this review. First, color-magnitude diagrams reaching below the horizontal branch have been constructed for two M31…
The recently discovered vast thin plane of dwarf satellites orbiting the Andromeda Galaxy (M31) adds to the mystery of the small scale distribution of the Local Group's galaxy population. Such well defined planar structures are apparently…
We present the discovery of two new dwarf galaxies, Andromeda XXI and Andromeda XXII, located in the surroundings of the Andromeda and Triangulum galaxies (M31 and M33). These discoveries stem from the first year data of the Pan-Andromeda…
We present the results of a deep study of the isolated dwarf galaxies Andromeda XXVIII and Andromeda XXIX with Gemini/GMOS and Keck/DEIMOS. Both galaxies are shown to host old, metal-poor stellar populations with no detectable recent star…
The Andromeda galaxy (M31) is the most nearby giant spiral galaxy, an opportunity to study with high resolution dynamical phenomena occurring in nuclear disks and bulges, able to explain star formation quenching, and galaxy evolution…
The interaction between an accreting satellite and the Andromeda galaxy (M31) has been studied analytically and numerically, using a high-resolution N-body simulation with $4\times10^7$ particles. For the first time, we show the…
We investigated a scenario in which M31 could be the remnant of a gas-rich major merger. Galaxy merger simulations, highly constrained by observations, were run using GADGET 2 in order to reproduce M31. We succeeded in reproducing the…
The nearest giant spiral, M31, exhibits a kinematically hot stellar disc, a global star formation episode ~2-4 Gyr ago, and conspicuous substructures in its stellar halo that are suggestive of a recent accretion event. Recent chemodynamical…
Transition type dwarf galaxies are thought to be systems undergoing the process of transformation from a star-forming into a passively evolving dwarf, which makes them particularly suitable to study evolutionary processes driving the…
Tidal streams from existing and destroyed satellite galaxies populate the outer regions of the Andromeda galaxy (M31). This inhomogeneous debris can be studied without many of the obstacles that plague Milky Way research. We review the…
Most of dwarf spheroidal galaxies in the Local Group were probably formed via environmental processes like the tidal interaction with the Milky Way. We study this process via N-body simulations of dwarf galaxies evolving on seven different…
We perform collisionless N-body simulations to investigate whether binary mergers between rotationally-supported dwarfs can lead to the formation of dwarf spheroidal galaxies (dSphs). Our simulation campaign is based on a hybrid approach…
We focus on the evidence of a past minor merger discovered in the halo of the Andromeda galaxy (M31). Previous N-body studies have enjoyed moderate success in producing the observed giant stellar stream (GSS) and stellar shells in M31's…