Related papers: The Morphological Evolution of Merger Remnants
Galactic bulges are known to harbour central black holes whose mass is tightly correlated with the stellar mass and velocity dispersion of the bulge. In a hierarchical universe, mergers of subgalactic units are accompanied by the…
Massive galaxies with a half-mass radius <~ 1kpc are observed in the early universe (z~>2), but not in the local universe. In the local universe similar-mass (within a factor of two) galaxies tend to be a factor of 4 to 5 larger. Dry minor…
We study the correlation between the morphological mix of cluster galaxies and the assembly history of the parent cluster by taking advantage of two independently developed semi-analytic models for galaxy formation and evolution. In our…
We discuss constraints on the assembly history of supermassive black holes from the observed remnant black holes in nearby galaxies and from the emission caused by accretion onto these black holes. We also summarize the results of a…
We report high quality near-infrared spectroscopy of 12 ultra-luminous infrared galaxy mergers (ULIRGs). Our new VLT and Keck data provide ~0.5" resolution, stellar and gas kinematics of these galaxies most of which are compact systems in…
[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…
We explore the effects of dissipationless merging on the Fundamental Plane of elliptical galaxies by using a N-body code based on a new, high performance numerical scheme (Dehnen 2002). We investigate the extreme cases of galaxy growth by…
Recent low-redshift observations have attempted to determine the star formation histories of elliptical galaxies by tracking correlations between the stellar population parameters (age and metallicity) and the structural parameters that…
The bimodal globular cluster (GC) metallicity distributions of many giant elliptical galaxies are often cited as evidence for the formation of such galaxies through mergers involving gas-rich spirals. In such models, the metal- rich GCs are…
Close encounters between two initially unbound objects can result in a binary system if enough energy is released as gravitational waves (GWs). We address the scenario in which such encounters occur in merging elliptical galaxies. There is…
Using semi-analytical models of galaxy formation, the origin of boxy and disky elliptical galaxies is investigated. We find that the simple scenario, motivated by N-body simulations, in which the isophotal shape is only dependent on the…
Observations have evidenced that passively evolving massive galaxies at high redshift are much more compact than local galaxies with the same stellar mass. We argue that the observed strong evolution in size is directly related to the…
We have studied a large number of elliptical galaxies and found a correlation between their dark matter content and the ellipticity of their visible shape. The galaxies were strictly selected so that only typical medium-size elliptical…
We simulate mergers between galaxies containing collisionally-relaxed nuclei around massive black holes (MBHs). Our galaxies contain four mass groups, representative of old stellar populations; a primary goal is to understand the…
The modern merger hypothesis offers a method of forming a new elliptical galaxy through merging two equal-mass, gas-rich disk galaxies fuelling a nuclear starburst followed by efficient quenching and dynamical stabilization. A key…
We discuss the merging rates in compact groups of 5 identical elliptical galaxies. All groups have the same mass and binding energy. We consider both cases with individual halos and cases where the halo is common to all galaxies and…
A brief overview of the properties of massive star clusters in early-type galaxies is given. All ellipticals (with only one known exception) host massive star clusters in the form of globular clusters, suggesting that their formation is…
Galaxy mergers are known to host abundant young massive cluster (YMC) populations, whose formation mechanism is still not well-understood. Here, we present a high-resolution galaxy merger simulation with explicit star formation and stellar…
We study the impact of merging supermassive black holes (SMBHs) on the central regions of massive early-type galaxies (ETGs) using a series of merger simulations with varying mass ratios. The ETG models include realistic stellar and dark…
Hubble Space Telescope (HST) observations reveal that the density of stars in most elliptical galaxies rises toward the center in a power-law cusp. Many of these galaxies also contain central dark objects,possibly supermassive black holes.…