Related papers: The Hierarchical Formation of the Galactic Disk
Galaxy interactions expel a significant amount of stars and gas into the surrounding environment. I review the formation and evolution of the tidal debris spawned during these collisions, and describe how this evolution depends on the large…
The formation of disk galaxies is one of the most outstanding problems in modern astrophysics and cosmology. We review the progress made by numerical simulations carried out on large parallel supercomputers. Recent progress stems from a…
Single massive satellites are of great observational interest, as they can produce prominent and potentially detectable signatures. For terrestrial planets and super-Earths, giant impacts in the late stages of formation may generate dense…
We explore the possibility that extended disks, such as that recently discovered in M31, are the result of a single dwarf (10^9--10^10 Msun) satellite merger. We carry out N-body simulations of dwarf NFW halos with embedded spheriodal…
We use a set of high-resolution N-body simulations of the Galactic disk to study its interactions with the population of satellites predicted cosmologically. One simulation illustrates that multiple passages of massive satellites with…
The disk galaxy simulated using our chemo-dynamical galaxy formation code, GCD+, is shown to have a thick disk component. This is evidenced by the velocity dispersion versus age relation for solar neighbourhood stars, which clearly shows an…
Most stars form in compact, dense embedded clusters with memberships ranging from a dozen stars to many millions of stars. Embedded clusters containing more than a few hundred stars also contain O stars that disrupt the nebula abruptly.…
The Disk of Satellites (DoS) observed in the Andromeda galaxy is a thin and extended group of satellites, nearly perpendicular to the disk plane, that share a common direction of rotation about the centre of Andromeda. Although a DoS is…
If the favored hierarchical cosmological model is correct, then the Milky Way system should have accreted ~100-200 luminous satellite galaxies in the past \~12 Gyr. We model this process using a hybrid semi-analytic plus N-body approach…
Disks are essential to the formation of both stars and planets, but how they form in magnetized molecular cloud cores remains debated. This work focuses on how the disk formation is affected by turbulence and ambipolar diffusion (AD), both…
Tidal interactions of galaxies in galaxy clusters have been proposed as one potential explanation of the morphology-density relation at low masses. The efficiency of tidal transformation is expected to depend strongly on the orbit of a…
Recent advances in our understanding of massive star formation have made clear the important role of protostellar disks in mediating accretion. Here we describe a simple, semi-analytic model for young, deeply embedded, massive accretion…
We simulate the formation of a realistic disk galaxy within the hierarchical scenario of structure formation and study its internal properties to the present epoch. We compare results from a LambdaCDM simulation with a LambdaWDM (2keV)…
How does the tidal debris of minor galaxy mergers contribute to structures in spiral galaxies or in the intergalactic medium? While major mergers are known to create structures such as tidal dwarf galaxies and star clusters within their…
The relics of disrupted satellite galaxies around the Milky Way and Andromeda have been found, but direct evidence of a satellite galaxy in the early stages of being disrupted has remained elusive. We have discovered a dwarf satellite…
We perform collisionless N-body simulations to investigate the evolution of the structural and kinematical properties of simulated thick disks induced by the growth of an embedded thin disk. The thick disks used in the present study…
The formation and evolution of galactic disks is particularly important for understanding how galaxies form and evolve, and the cause of the variety in which they appear to us. Ongoing large surveys, made possible by new instrumentation at…
We use FIRE simulations to study disk formation in z~0, Milky Way-mass galaxies, and conclude that a key ingredient for the formation of thin stellar disks is the ability for accreting gas to develop an aligned angular momentum distribution…
We study the vertical heating and thickening of galaxy disks due to accretion of small satellites. Our simulations are restricted to axial symmetry, which largely eliminates numerical evolution of the target galaxy but requires the…
Mergers between gas--rich disks and less--massive dwarf galaxies are studied using numerical simulation. As the orbit of a satellite decays through dynamical friction, the primary disk develops large-amplitude spirals in response to its…