Related papers: Physical processes behind the morphological Hubble…
We present preliminary results on the effects of mergers on the chemical properties of galactic objects in hierarchical clustering scenarios. We adopt a hydrodynamical chemical code that allows to describe the coupled evolution of dark…
We present a systematic cosmological study of a universe in which the visible sector is coupled, albeit very weakly, to a hidden sector comprised of its own set of particles and interactions. Assuming that dark matter (DM) resides in the…
We discuss the formation of supermassive black holes in the early universe, and how to probe their subsequent evolution with the upcoming mm/sub-mm telescope ALMA. We first focus on the chemical and radiative conditions for black hole…
Topological defects are thought to be left behind by the cosmological phase transitions which occur as the universe expands and cools. Similar processes can be studied in the phase transitions which take place in the laboratory:…
The formation of galaxies in a CDM cosmogony is investigated by following the evolution of dark and baryonic matter and of the frequency- dependent spatially averaged radiation field. The gas is allowed to form stars which are independently…
Inspired by recent work on feedback in disk galaxies (Efstathiou 2000, Silk 2003) and on the angular momentum distribution in simulated gas halos (Sharma and Steinmetz 2005), a fully dynamic model of disk galaxy formation and evolution has…
The initial conditions, physics, and outcome of planet formation are now constrained by detailed observations of protoplanetary disks, laboratory experiments, and the discovery of thousands of extrasolar planetary systems. These…
After the discovery that supermassive black holes (SMBHs) are ubiquitous at the center of stellar spheroids and that their mass Mbh, in the range 10^6-10^9 Msun, is tightly related to global properties of the host stellar system, the idea…
This chapter aims to present an introduction to current research on the nature of the cosmological dark matter and the origin of galaxies and large scale structure within the standard theoretical framework: gravitational collapse of…
Understanding the physical formation of the Hubble sequence remains one of the most important unsolved astrophysical problems. Searches for proto-disks and proto-ellipticals can now be effectively done using deep wide-field Hubble Space…
The currently discussed theories of bulge formation are reviewed, including the primordial scenario, where bulges form rapidly and then accrete disks, the secular scenario, where bulges are formed by dynamical evolution of disks through…
In this paper we address the issue of the origin of some observational properties of the galactic globular cluster system. After a preliminary study of some general properties of the main evolutionary processes, we investigate the evolution…
The aim of this thesis is to question some of the basic assumptions that go into building the $\Lambda$CDM model of our universe. The assumptions we focus on are the initial conditions of the universe, the fundamental forces in the universe…
Observations now probe the star formation history of the Universe back to a redshift of $z\sim5$. We investigate whether the predictions of semi-analytic models of galaxy formation based on hierarchical Cold Dark Matter (CDM) type models…
The formation of galaxy clusters in hierarchically clustering universes is investigated by means of high resolution N-body simulations. The simulations are performed using a newly developed multi-mass scheme which combines a PM code with a…
Galactic spheroids can form as a result of galaxy interactions and mergers of disks. Detailed analyses of the photometric properties, the intrinsic orbital structure, the line-of-sight velocity distributions and the kinemetry of simulated…
We are learning much about how structure forms, in particular how clusters as nodes in the cosmic web evolve and accrete matter, and about the physical processes within these objects. In the next decade, the study of clusters will enable us…
Deep surveys conducted during the past decades have shown that galaxies in the distant universe are generally of more irregular shapes, and are disky in appearance and in their star formation rate, compared to galaxies in similar…
We first review the results of the tidal stirring model for the transformation of gas-rich dwarf irregulars into dwarf spheroidals, which turns rotationally supported stellar systems into pressure supported ones. We emphasize the importance…
Properties of groups of galaxies depend sensitively on the algorithm for group selection, and even the most recent catalogs of groups built from redshift-space selection should suffer from projections and infalling galaxies. The…