Related papers: Galaxies as fluctuations in cosmic stellar liquid
Stars form by gravoturbulent fragmentation of interstellar gas clouds. The supersonic turbulence ubiquitously observed in Galactic molecular gas generates strong density fluctuations with gravity taking over in the densest and most massive…
Due to the clumpy nature of the self gravitating gas composing the interstellar medium, it is not clear whether galactic gas dynamics can be discussed in terms of standard hydrodynamics. Nevertheless, it is clear that certain generic…
Galactic bulges are complex systems. Once thought to be small-scale versions of elliptical galaxies, advances in astronomical instrumentation (spectroscopy in particular) has revealed a wealth of photometric and kinematic substructure in…
Gravitational lensing studies suggest that the Universe may contain a population of dark galaxies; we investigate this intriguing possibility and propose a mechanism to explain their nature. In this mechanism a dark galaxy is formed with a…
Large surveys of the local Universe have shown that galaxies with different intrinsic properties, such as colour, luminosity and morphological type display a range of clustering amplitudes. Galaxies are therefore not faithful tracers of the…
The mass derived from gravitational lensing reflects the total mass contained in the lensing system, independent of the specific matter contents and states. A comparison of the dynamical masses from hydrostatic equilibrium with the…
The orbital decay and tidal disruption of a star cluster in a galaxy is studied in an analytical manner. Owing to dynamical friction, the star cluster spirals in toward the center of the galaxy. Simultaneously, the galactic tidal field…
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…
The gas component plays a major role in the dynamics of spiral galaxies, because of its dissipative character, and its ability to exchange angular momentum with stars in the disk. Due to its small velocity dispersion, it triggers…
A new physical phenomenon is identified: volumetric stellar emission into gravitationally bound orbits of weakly coupled particles such as axions, moduli, hidden photons, and neutrinos. While only a tiny fraction of the instantaneous…
We examine the peculiar velocity distribution function of galaxies in cosmological many-body gravitational clustering. Our statistical mechanical approach derives a previous basic assumption and generalizes earlier results to galaxies with…
In this paper we address the issue of the origin of some observational properties of the galactic globular cluster system. After a preliminary study of some general properties of the main evolutionary processes, we investigate the evolution…
Galaxies in the Universe are distributed in a web-like structure characterised by different large-scale environments: dense clusters, elongated filaments, sheetlike walls, and under-dense regions, called voids. The low density in voids is…
We present a new two-fluid conduction scheme to simulate the evolution of an isolated, self-gravitating, equilibrium cluster of stars and collisionless dark matter on secular (gravothermal) timescales. We integrate the equations in…
Spirals in galaxies have long been thought to be caused by gravitational instability in the stellar component of the disk, but discerning the precise mechanism had proved elusive. Tidal interactions, and perhaps bars, may provoke some…
We study the evolution of global shapes of galaxies using cosmological simulations. The shapes refer to the components of dark matter (DM), stars and gas at the stellar half-mass radius. Most galaxies undergo a characteristic compaction…
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…
Most stars form in dense star clusters deeply embedded in residual gas. These objects must therefore be seen as the fundamental building blocks of galaxies. With this contribution some physical processes that act in the very early and also…
Self-gravitating systems such as elliptical galaxies appear to have a constant specific entropy and obey a scaling law relating their potential energy to their mass. These properties can be interpreted as due to the physical processes…
Globular clusters are valuable fossil records of the formation and evolution of their host galaxies. The color distribution of elliptical galaxy globular cluster systems indicates an episodic formation history, consistent with a merger…