Related papers: Relaxed blue ellipticals: accretion-driven stellar…
Star-forming blue early-type galaxies at low redshift can give insight to the stellar mass growth of L$*$ elliptical galaxies in the local Universe. We wish to understand the reason for star formation in these otherwise passively evolving…
We have studied a sample of 89 very isolated, elliptical galaxies at z < 0.08 and compared their properties with elliptical galaxies located in a high-density environment such as the Coma supercluster. Our aim is to probe the role of…
The traditional view of elliptical galaxies has been that they formed in a single, rapid burst of star formation at high redshift, and have evolved quiescently since that time. In opposition to this traditional view is evidence that at…
In hierarchical models of galaxy formation, ellipticals form from the merging of disk galaxies drawn together by gravity as their surrounding dark halos coalesce. Using semi-analytic techniques, we are able to follow the merging, star…
The last decade of research on elliptical galaxies has produced a wealth of new information concerning both their detailed structure and their global scaling relations. We review the old and new results about isophote shapes and…
The structural properties of elliptical galaxies are consistent with their formation in a merging hierarchy. In this picture, the role of gaseous processes and dissipation decreased with increasing mass creating preferentially rotationally…
We use the Sloan Digital Sky Survey to investigate the properties of massive elliptical galaxies in the local Universe (z\leq0.08) that have unusually blue optical colors. Through careful inspection, we distinguish elliptical from…
The formation and evolution of elliptical galaxies in low-density environments are less understood than classical elliptical galaxies in high-density environments. Isolated galaxies are defined as galaxies without massive neighbors within…
[Abridged] We study the properties, evolution and formation mechanisms of isolated field elliptical galaxies. We create a mock catalogue of isolated field elliptical galaxies from the Millennium Simulation Galaxy Catalogue, and trace their…
In models of galaxy formation in a hierarchical Universe, elliptical galaxies form through the merging of smaller disk systems. These models yield a number of testable predictions if reliable techniques for determining the relative ages and…
Dedicated photometric and spectroscopic surveys have provided unambiguous evidence for a strong stellar mass-size evolution of galaxies within the last 10 Gyr. The likely progenitors of today's most massive galaxies are remarkably small,…
In order to constrain parameters in galaxy formation theories, especially those for a star formation process, we investigate cold gas in elliptical galaxies. We calculate the detection rate of cold gas in them using a semi-analytic model of…
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…
We take advantage of the largest high-resolution simulation of cosmic structure growth ever carried out -- the Millennium Simulation of the concordance LambdaCDM cosmogony -- to study how the star formation histories, ages and metallicities…
The formation and evolution of elliptical galaxies (EGs) is still an open question. In particular, recent observations suggest that elliptical galaxies are not only simple spheroidal systems of old stars. In this paper we analyze a sample…
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…
We consider the hypothesis that the formation of elliptical galaxies includes a phase in which star formation is mostly restricted to massive stars, with the bias towards high mass stars increasing with elliptical galaxy mass. The mass…
Massive early-type galaxies have undergone dramatic structural evolution over the last 10 Gyr. A companion paper shows that nearby elliptical galaxies with M*>1.3x10^{11} M_sun generically contain three photometric subcomponents: a compact…
We use a set of high-resolution N-body simulations of binary galaxy mergers to show that the morphologies of the tidal features that are seen around a large fraction of nearby, massive ellipticals in the field, cannot be reproduced by…
We study the stellar populations of 1,923 elliptical galaxies at z<0.05 selected from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey as a function of velocity dispersion, sigma, and environment. We construct average, high signal-to-noise spectra and find the…