Related papers: Elliptical galaxies/stellar halos connection
Elliptical galaxies formed in a major merger tend to become more nearly spherical with time, thanks to the gravitational effect of their central black hole (or black holes). Observational results indicate that elliptical galaxies with older…
State-of-the-art integral field surveys like $\mathrm{ATLAS^{3D}}$, SLUGGS, CALIFA, SAMI, and MaNGA provide large data sets of kinematical observations of early-type galaxies (ETGs), yielding constraints on the formation of ETGs. Using the…
Mass and angular momentum are key parameters of galaxies. Their co-evolution establishes an empirical relation between the specific stellar angular momentum j* and the stellar mass M* that depends on morphology. In this work, we measure j*…
Deep exposure imaging of early-type galaxies (ETGs) are revealing the second-order complexity of these objects, which have been long considered uniform, dispersion-supported spheroidals. "Fine structure" features (e.g. ripples, plumes,…
How elliptical galaxy dynamics relate to galaxy structure, stellar populations, spiral galaxies and environment are reviewed. The evidence assembled shows that most, if not all, galaxies originally classified as gE contain disks within…
The luminosity dependence of kinematical and isophotal properties of elliptical galaxies is investigated using numerical simulations of galaxy merging, combined with semi-analytical models of hierarchical structure formation. Mergers of…
We present a determination of the two-dimensional shape parameters of the blue and red globular cluster systems (GCSs) in a large number of elliptical galaxies and lenticular galaxies (early-type galaxies, called ETGs). We use a homogeneous…
We study the origin of the wide distribution of angles between the angular momenta of the stellar and gas components, $\alpha_{\rm G,S}$, in early-type galaxies (ETGs). We use the GALFORM model of galaxy formation, set in the $\Lambda$ cold…
To break the degeneracy among galactic stellar components, we extract kinematic structures using the framework described in Du et al. (2019, 2020). For example, the concept of stellar halos is generalized to weakly-rotating structures that…
The formation of tidal dwarf galaxies (TDGs) is triggered by the encounters of already existing galaxies. Their existence is predicted from numerical calculations of encountering galaxies and is also well documented with observations. The…
Major progress has been achieved in recent years in mapping the properties of passively-evolving, early-type galaxies (ETG) from the local universe all the way to redshift ~2. Here, age and metallicity estimates for local cluster and field…
Hierarchical galaxy formation models predict the development of elliptical galaxies through a combination of the mergers and interactions of smaller galaxies. We are carrying out a study of Early-Type Galaxies (ETGs) using GAMA…
In the hierarchical two-phase formation scenario, the extended halos of early type galaxies (ETGs) are expected to have different physical properties from those of the galaxies' central regions. This work aims at characterizing the…
Modern observational and analytic techniques now enable the direct measurement of star formation histories and the inference of galaxy assembly histories. However, current theoretical predictions of assembly are not ideally suited for…
Observations of galaxy isophotes, longs-slit kinematics and high-resolution photometry suggested a possible dichotomy between two distinct classes of E galaxies. But these methods are expensive for large galaxy samples. Instead,…
Theory predicts that cosmological gas accretion plays a fundamental role fuelling star formation in galaxies. However, a detailed description of the accretion process to be used when interpreting observations is still lacking. Using the…
A simple, observationally-motivated model is presented for understanding how halo masses, galaxy stellar masses, and star formation rates are related, and how these relations evolve with time. The relation between halo mass and galaxy…
There are many proposed mechanisms driving the morphological transformation of disk galaxies to elliptical galaxies. In this paper, we determine if the observed transformation in low mass groups can be explained by the merger histories of…
Dry (i.e. dissipationless) merging has been proposed as the main driver of the observed size evolution of early-type galaxies (ETGs). The actual role of this mechanism is questioned by the tightness of the local stellar mass-size relation…
Galaxies grow primarily via accretion-driven star formation in discs and merger-driven growth of bulges. These processes are implicit in semi-analytical models of galaxy formation, with bulge growth in particular relating directly to the…