Related papers: Elliptical galaxies/stellar halos connection
Galaxies are expected to accrete pristine gas from their surroundings to sustain their star formation over cosmic timescales. Its lower abundance affects the metallicity of the ISM in which stars are born, leaving chemical imprints in the…
Gravitational interactions and mergers are shaping and reshaping galaxies throughout the observable universe. While observations of interacting galaxies at low redshifts yield detailed information about the processes at work, observations…
[abridged] The mass-size relation of early-type galaxies (ETGs) has been largely studied in the last years to probe the mass assembly of the most massive objects in the Universe. In this paper, we focus on the mass-size relation of…
The degree of influence that environment and mass have on the stellar populations of early-type galaxies is uncertain. In this paper we present the results of a spectroscopic analysis of the stellar populations of early-type galaxies aimed…
In our modern understanding of galaxy formation, every galaxy forms within a dark matter halo. The formation and growth of galaxies over time is connected to the growth of the halos in which they form. The advent of large galaxy surveys as…
The hierarchical model of galaxy evolution suggests that the impact of mergers is substantial on the intricate processes that drive stellar assembly within a galaxy. However, accurately measuring the contribution of accretion to a galaxy's…
The variation of temperature and density in the hot, X-ray emitting gas around massive, group dominant elliptical galaxies can be understood as a combination of gas ejected from evolving galactic stars and gas that accumulates in the outer…
We outline a scenario of galaxy formation in which the gas in galaxy-forming regions was preheated to high entropy by vigorous energy feedback associated with the formation of stars in old ellipticals and bulges and with AGN activity. Such…
We use the Illustris simulation to study the relative contributions of in situ star formation and stellar accretion to the build-up of galaxies over an unprecedentedly wide range of masses ($M_{\ast} = 10^9-10^{12} \, {\rm M_{\odot}}$),…
We use very high-S/N stacked spectra of $\sim$29,000 nearby quiescent early-type galaxies (ETGs) from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) to investigate variations in their star formation histories (SFHs) with environment at fixed position…
The influence of both major and minor mergers is expected to significantly affect gradients of stellar ages and metallicities in the outskirts of galaxies. Measurements of observed gradients are beginning to reach large radii in galaxies,…
A new view on our Galaxy has recently emerged, with large consequences on its formation scenarios. Not only new dwarf satellites have been detected, still orbiting and tidally disrupting, but also a multitude of stellar streams or tidal…
Recent observational and theoretical work suggests that the formation of the Galactic stellar halo involved both dissipative processes and the accretion of subfragments. With present data, the fraction of the halo for which an accretion…
We present EMERGE, an Empirical ModEl for the foRmation of GalaxiEs, describing the evolution of individual galaxies in large volumes from $z\sim10$ to the present day. We assign a star formation rate to each dark matter halo based on its…
Early-type (E and S0) galaxies may have assembled via a variety of different evolutionary pathways. Here we investigate these pathways by comparing the stellar kinematic properties of 24 early-type galaxies from the SLUGGS survey with the…
Nearby galaxies are the end result of their cosmological evolution, which is predicted to be influenced by the growth of their host dark matter halos. This co-evolution potentially leaves signatures in present-day observed galaxy…
Globular cluster systems provide valuable fossil records of the formation history of their parent galaxies. This review specifically concentrates on using color distributions of the globular cluster systems of elliptical galaxies to…
Galaxy merger timescales are crucial for understanding and modeling galaxy formation in our hierarchically structured Universe. However, previous studies have reported widely varying dependencies of merger timescales on initial orbital…
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 evolution of the galaxy stellar mass function is especially useful to test the current model of galaxy formation. Observational data have revealed a few inconsistencies with predictions from the $\Lambda {\rm CDM}$ model. For example,…