Related papers: Comparing galaxy merger orbits in hydrodynamical s…
We study supermassive black holes (BHs) in merging galaxies, using a suite of hydrodynamical simulations with very high spatial (~10 pc) and temporal (~1 Myr) resolution, where we vary the initial mass ratio, the orbital configuration, and…
Galaxy mergers are critical events that influence galaxy evolution by driving processes such as enhanced star formation, quenching, and active galactic nucleus (AGN) activity. However, constraining the timescales over which these processes…
The majority of galaxy mergers are expected to be minor mergers. The observational signatures of minor mergers are not well understood, thus there exist few constraints on the minor merger rate. This paper seeks to address this gap in our…
Using parsec scale resolution hydrodynamical adaptive mesh refinement simulations we have studied the mass transport process throughout a galactic merger. The aim of such study is to connect both the peaks of mass accretion rate onto the…
Two-dimensional integral field surveys such as ATLAS^3D are producing rich observational data sets yielding insights into galaxy formation. These new kinematic observations have highlighted the need to understand the evolutionary mechanisms…
We have developed a simple yet surprisingly accurate analytic scheme for tracking the dynamical evolution of substructure within larger dark halos. The scheme incorporates the effects of dynamical friction, tidal mass loss and tidal heating…
We study the dynamical evolution of supermassive black holes (BHs) in merging galaxies on scales of hundreds of kpc to 10 pc, to identify the physical processes that aid or hinder the orbital decay of BHs. We present hydrodynamical…
Galaxy mergers are fundamental drivers of galaxy evolution and black hole (BH) growth across cosmic time. We use the Horizon-AGN simulation to investigate the fraction of galaxy pairs, the merger fraction, and the galaxy merger rate over a…
Future weak lensing measurements of cosmic shear will reach such high accuracy that second order effects in weak lensing modeling, like the influence of baryons on structure formation, become important. We use a controlled set of state of…
We study the effects of mergers on the structural properties of disc-like systems by using Smooth Particle Hydrodynamical (SPH) numerical simulations in hierarchical clustering scenarios. In order to assess the effects of mergers on the…
Merging galaxy clusters have been touted as one of the best probes for constraining self-interacting dark matter, but few simulations exist to back up this claim. We simulate equal mass mergers of 10$^{15}$ M$_\odot$ halos, like the El…
Mergers of Primordial Black Holes (PBHs) may contribute to the gravitational wave mergers detected by the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA (LVK) Collaboration. We study the dynamics of PBH binaries dressed with dark matter (DM) spikes, for PBHs with…
We perform a comprehensive estimate of the frequency of galaxy mergers and their impact on star formation over z~0.24--0.80 (lookback time T_b~3--7 Gyr) using 3698 (M*>=1e9 Msun) galaxies with GEMS HST, COMBO-17, and Spitzer data. Our…
In the current concordance cosmology small halos are expected to be completely dark and can significantly perturb low-mass galaxies during minor merger interactions. These interactions may well contribute to the diversity of the dwarf…
We present an observational analysis of numerical simulations of galaxy cluster mergers. We identify several observational signatures of recent merger activity, and quantitatively assess the uncertainty introduced into cluster mass…
This paper presents a study of the specific merger rate as a function of group membership, local environment, and redshift in a very large, $500h^{-1} Mpc$, cosmological N-body simulation, the \textit{Millennium Simulation}. The goal is to…
We investigate the influence of dark energy on structure formation, within five different cosmological models, namely a concordance $\Lambda$CDM model, two models with dynamical dark energy, viewed as a quintessence scalar field (using a RP…
We quantify the impact of galaxy formation on dark matter halo shapes using cosmological simulations at redshift $z=0$. The haloes are drawn from the IllustrisTNG project, a suite of magneto-hydrodynamic simulations of galaxies. We focus on…
In this work we establish and test methods for implementing dynamical friction for massive black hole pairs that form in large volume cosmological hydrodynamical simulations which include galaxy formation and black hole growth. We verify…
Recent gravitational wave observations include possible detections of black hole - neutron star binary mergers. As with binary black hole mergers, numerical simulations help characterize the sources. For binary systems with neutron star…