Related papers: On the origin of the galaxy luminosity function
The formation of stars from gas drives the evolution of galaxies. Yet, it remains one of the hardest processes to understand when trying to connect observations of stellar and galaxy populations to models of large scale structure formation.…
Observations of the nearby large galaxies that can be examined in particularly close detail suggest that many have small stellar luminosity fractions in bulges and haloes. Simulations of galaxy formation tend to produce considerably larger…
Recent observational and theoretical work suggests that the formation of the Galactic stellar halo involved both dissipative processes and the accretion of subfragments. With present data, the fraction of the halo for which an accretion…
We study the evolution of gas in HII regions around the first stars after the death of the exciting stars. If the first star in a small halo dies without supernova (SN), subsequent star formation is possible in the same halo. We thus…
High resolution X-ray spectra reveal hidden cooling flows depositing cold gas at the centres of massive nearby early-type galaxies with little sign of normal star formation. Optical observations are revealing that a bottom-heavy Initial…
Young galaxies are clumpy, gas-rich, and highly turbulent. Star formation appears to occur by gravitational instabilities in galactic disks. The high dispersion makes the clumps massive and the disks thick. The star formation rate should be…
The cosmic ultraviolet background (UVB) heats the intergalactic medium (IGM), as a result the gas in dark matter halos below a certain mass is too hot to cool within a Hubble time. The UVB effectively suppresses the formation of dwarf…
Star formation generally proceeds inside-out, with overdense regions inside protostellar cores collapsing rapidly and progressively less dense regions following later. Consequently, a small protostar will form early in the evolution of a…
We use FIRE-2 cosmological zoom-in hydrodynamic simulations to investigate the co-evolution between Milky Way-size galaxies and their host dark matter halos. We find that the formation of these galaxies follows a two-phase pattern, with an…
In colour-magnitude diagrams most galaxies fall in either the ``blue cloud'' or the ``red sequence'', with the red sequence extending to significantly brighter magnitudes than the blue cloud. The bright-end of the red sequence comprises…
To constrain the nature of the very first stars, we investigate the collapse and fragmentation of primordial, metal-free gas clouds. We explore the physics of primordial star formation by means of three-dimensional simulations of the dark…
We perform numerical simulations for the formation of the Galactic stellar halo, based on the currently favored cold dark matter (CDM) theory of galaxy formation. Our numerical models, taking into account both dynamical and chemical…
Several active galaxies show strong evidence for fast ($v_{\rm out} \sim 1000~{\rm km\,s}^{-1}$) massive ($\dot{M} =$ several $\times 1000~\msun\,{\rm yr}^{-1}$) gas outflows. Such outflows are expected on theoretical grounds once the…
I discuss recent theoretical work on the formation and evolution of galaxies paying particular attention to the ability of current models to make detailed comparisons with observations of the galaxy population both nearby and at high…
The characterization of the large amount of gas residing in the galaxy halos, the so called circumgalactic medium (CGM), is crucial to understand galaxy evolution across cosmic time. We focus here on the the cool ($T\sim10^4$ K) phase of…
We examine the temperature history of gas accreted by forming galaxies in SPH simulations. About half the gas shock heats to roughly the virial temperature of the galaxy potential well before cooling, condensing, and forming stars, but the…
There is accumulating evidence that the faint end of the galaxy luminosity function might be very different in different locations. The luminosity function might be rising in rich clusters and flat or declining in regions of low density. If…
We perform a set of cosmological simulations of early structure formation with incorporating baryonic streaming motions. We present a case where a significantly elongated gas cloud with $\sim\!10^4\,$solar masses (${\rm M_\odot}$) is formed…
The physical origin of high velocity cool gas seen in galactic winds remains unknown. Following Wang (1995), we argue that radiative cooling in initially hot thermally-driven outflows can produce fast neutral atomic and photoionized cool…
Quiescent galaxies (QGs) typically have little cold gas to form stars. The discovery of gas-rich QGs challenges our conventional understanding of the evolutionary paths of galaxies. We take advantage of a new catalog of nearby, massive…