Related papers: GalactiKit: reconstructing mergers from $z=0$ debr…
A fundamental prediction of the LambdaCDM cosmology is the hierarchical build-up of structure and therefore the successive merging of galaxies into more massive ones. As one can only observe galaxies at one specific time in cosmic history,…
We investigate the growth of stellar discs in Milky Way-mass galaxies using the magnetohydrodynamical simulations of the Auriga Project in a full cosmological context. We focus on the gas accretion process along the discs, calculating the…
The infall and merger scenario of massive clusters in the Milky Way's potential well, as one of the Milky Way formation mechanisms, is reexamined to understand how the stars of the merging clusters are redistributed during and after the…
Ongoing large stellar spectroscopic surveys of the Milky Way seek to reconstruct the major events in the assembly history of the Galaxy. Chemical and kinematic observations can be used to separate the contributions of different progenitor…
Circa 10 billion years ago the Milky Way merged with a massive satellite, Gaia-Enceladus. To gain insight into the properties of its debris we analyse in detail the suite of simulations from Villalobos & Helmi (2008), which includes an…
We use galaxy-galaxy lensing to investigate how the dark matter (DM) haloes and stellar content of galaxies with $0.012 \leq z \leq 0.32$ and $10 \leq \log_{10}(M_\star/\mathrm{M}_\odot) \leq 12$ change as a result of the merger process. To…
Galaxies host a wide array of internal stellar components, which need to be decomposed accurately in order to understand their formation and evolution. While significant progress has been made with recent integral-field spectroscopic…
Many observable properties of globular clusters (GCs) provide valuable insights for unveiling the hierarchical assembly of their host galaxy. For the Milky Way (MW) in particular, GCs from different accreted satellite galaxies show distinct…
Galaxies play a key role in our endeavor to understand how structure formation proceeds in the Universe. For any precision study of cosmology or galaxy formation, there is a strong demand for huge sets of realistic mock galaxy catalogs,…
We develop a new method to account for the finite lifetimes of stars and trace individual abundances within a semi-analytic model of galaxy formation. At variance with previous methods, based on the storage of the (binned) past star…
We identify a simulated Milky Way analog in the EAGLE suite of cosmological hydrodynamical simulations. This galaxy not only shares similar global properties as the Milky Way, but was specifically selected because its merger history…
In the Milky Way, recent progress in the exploration of its assembly history is driven by the tremendous amount of high-quality data delivered by Gaia, which has revealed a number of substructures potentially linked to several ancient…
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…
Numerical simulations have become an indispensable tool in astrophysics. To interpret their results, it is critical to understand their intrinsic variability, that is, how much the results change with numerical noise or inherent…
We developed a new method to extract halo merger rates from the Millennium Simulation. First, by removing superfluous mergers that are artifacts of the FOF halo finder, we find a lower merger rate compared to previous work. The reductions…
Aims. We aim to perform consistent comparisons between observations and simulations on the mass dependence of the galaxy major merger fraction at low redshift over an unprecedentedly wide range of stellar masses (10^9 to 10^12 solar…
The cosmic web plays a major role in the formation and evolution of galaxies and defines, to a large extent, their properties. However, the relation between galaxies and environment is still not well understood. Here we present a machine…
The formation and chemical evolution of the Milky Way Galaxy is numerically simulated by developing a Monte Carlo approach to predict the elemental abundance gradients and other galactic features using the revised solar abundance. The…
The dark matter flux in a direct detection experiment depends on its local speed distribution. This distribution has been inferred from simulations of Milky Way-like galaxies, but such models serve only as proxies given that no simulation…
The standard cosmological model ($\Lambda$-CDM) predicts that galaxies are built through hierarchical assembly on cosmological timescales$^{1,2}$. The Milky Way, like other disc galaxies, underwent violent mergers and accretion of small…