Related papers: A 6-d View of Stellar Shells
This paper explores the mapping between the observable properties of a stellar halo in phase- and abundance-space and the parent galaxy's accretion history in terms of the characteristic epoch of accretion and mass and orbits of progenitor…
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…
Galaxy haloes contain fundamental clues about the galaxy formation and evolution process: hierarchical cosmological models predict haloes to be ubiquitous, and to be (at least in part) the product of past merger and/or accretion events. The…
(Abridged) We use numerical simulations to investigate the origin and structure of the luminous halos that surround isolated galaxies. These stellar structures extend out to several hundred kpc away from a galaxy, and consist of stars shed…
The satellites of the Milky Way and Andromeda represent the smallest galaxies we can observe in our Universe. In this series of papers we aim to shed light on their formation and evolution using cosmological hydrodynamical simulations. In…
The last 10-20 years has seen a profound shift in views of how the Galaxy's halo formed. The idea of a monolithic early collapse of a single system (Eggen, Lynden-Bell and Sandage 1962) has been challenged by observations at high redshift…
With the goal to refine modelling of shell galaxies and the use of shells to probe the merger history, we develop a new method for implementing dynamical friction in test-particle simulations of radial minor mergers. The friction is…
We study the links between star formation history and structure for a large mass-selected galaxy sample at 0.05 < z_phot < 0.30. The galaxies inhabit a very broad range of environments, from cluster cores to the field. Using HST images, we…
We introduce and apply a new approach to probe the response of galactic stellar haloes to the interplay between cosmological merger histories and galaxy formation physics. We perform dark matter-only, zoomed simulations of two Milky…
The hierarchical theory of galaxy formation rests on the idea that smaller galactic structures merge to form the galaxies that we see today. The past decade has provided remarkable observational support for this scenario, driven in part by…
Within the hierarchical framework for galaxy formation, merging and tidal interactions are expected to shape large galaxies to this day. While major mergers are quite rare at present, minor mergers and satellite disruptions - which result…
Shells are low surface brightness tidal debris that appear as interleaved caustics with large opening angles, often situated on both sides of the galaxy center. In this paper, we study the incidence and formation processes of shell galaxies…
Stellar halos of galaxies retain crucial clues to their mass assembly history. It is in these galactic components that the remains of cannibalised galactic building blocks are deposited. For the case of the Milky Way, the opportunity to…
Several deep observations such as those carried out at the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope (CFHT) have revealed prominent Low Surface Brightness (LSB) fine structures that change the apparent morphology of galaxies. Previous photometry…
Using cosmological hydrodynamical simulations, we investigate the effects of hierarchical aggregation on the triggering of star formation in galactic-like objects. We include a simple star formation model to transform the cold gas in dense…
If the Galaxy formed hierarchically through the accretion of smaller satellite galaxies we might hope to find signatures of this in the halo's phase-space distribution. I review theoretical ideas about what form these signatures should…
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…
Using galaxies from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey Data Release 7 (SDSS DR7) along with haloes from the dark matter only constrained ELUCID (Exploring the Local Universe with the reConstructed Initial Density field) simulation, we examine the…
We examine the tidal disruption of satellite galaxies in a cosmological simulation of the formation of a disk galaxy in the $\Lambda$CDM scenario. We find that the disruption of satellite galaxies in orbits roughly coplanar with the disk…
Galaxies are thought to grow through accretion; as less massive galaxies are disrupted and merge over time, their debris results in diffuse, clumpy stellar halos enveloping the central galaxy. Here we present a study of the variation in the…