Related papers: Fossil stellar streams and their globular cluster …
The Gaia mission has provided precise astrometry and spectrophotometry for billions of stars in the Milky Way, enabling the identification and kinematic characterization of stellar streams. These streams, remnants of disrupted globular…
Here we examine the Milky Way's GC system to estimate the fraction of accreted versus in situ formed GCs. We first assemble a high quality database of ages and metallicities for 93 Milky Way GCs from literature deep colour-magnitude data.…
Globular clusters (GCs) formed when the Milky Way experienced a phase of rapid assembly. We use the wealth of information contained in the Galactic GC population to quantify the properties of the satellite galaxies from which the Milky Way…
Knowledge of ages for stars formed over a galaxy's lifetime is fundamental to understand its formation and evolution. However, stellar ages are difficult to obtain since they cannot be measured from observations, being comparison with…
Thin stellar streams originating from globular clusters are among the most sensitive tracers of low-mass dark-matter subhalos. Joint analysis of the entire population of stellar streams will place the most robust constraints on the…
The mass distribution and chemical composition of globular cluster (GC) systems preserve fossil record of the early stages of galaxy formation. The observed distribution of GC colors within massive early-type galaxies in the ACS Virgo…
The formation history of globular clusters (GCs) at redshift $z > 4$ remains an unsolved problem. In this work, we use the cosmological, $N$-body hydrodynamical ``zoom-in'' simulation GigaEris to study the properties and formation of…
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…
Stellar ejecta gradually enrich the gas out of which subsequent stars form, making the least chemically enriched stellar systems direct fossils of structures formed in the early universe. Although a few hundred stars with metal content…
The Milky Way halo was predominantly formed by the merging of numerous progenitor galaxies. However, our knowledge of this process is still incomplete, especially in regard to the total number of mergers, their global dynamical properties…
We investigate the properties and evolution of star particles in two simulations of isolated spiral galaxies, and two galaxies from cosmological simulations. Unlike previous numerical work, where typically each star particle represents one…
Globular clusters (GCs) are powerful tracers of the galaxy assembly process, and have already been used to obtain a detailed picture of the progenitors of the Milky Way. Using the E-MOSAICS cosmological simulation of a (34.4 Mpc)$^3$ volume…
Two studies have recently reported the discovery of pronounced Halo substructure in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) commissioning data. Here we show that this Halo substructure is almost in its entirety due to the expected tidal stream…
The central density profiles in dwarf galaxy halos depend strongly on the nature of dark matter. Recently, in Malhan et al. (2021), we employed N-body simulations to show that the cuspy cold dark matter (CDM) subhalos predicted by…
We use the very high resolution, fully cosmological simulations from the Aquarius project, coupled to a semi-analytical model of galaxy formation, to study the phase-space distribution of halo stars in "solar neighbourhood"-like volumes. We…
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…
Satellite galaxies in galaxy clusters represent a significant fraction of the global galaxy population. Because of the unusual dense environment of clusters, their evolution is driven by different mechanisms than the ones affecting field or…
We present a method to couple N-body star cluster simulations to a cosmological tidal field, using the Astrophysical Multipurpose Software Environment. We apply this method to star clusters embedded in the CosmoGrid dark matter-only…
We present a review of the present state of knowledge regarding the relative ages of Galactic globular clusters. First, we discuss the relevant galaxy formation models and describe the detailed predictions they make with respect to the…
(Abridged) We investigate the hypothesis that some fraction of the globular clusters presently observed in the Galactic halo formed in external dwarf galaxies, by means of a detailed comparison between Zinn's "old halo", "young halo", and…