Related papers: Substructure and Tidal Debris in Local Galaxies: M…
(Abridged) We investigate the hypothesis that some fraction of the globular clusters presently observed in the Galactic halo formed in external dwarf galaxies, by means of a detailed comparison between Zinn's "old halo", "young halo", and…
Ultraluminous galaxies in the local universe (z$\leq$0.2) emit the bulk of their energy in the mid and far-infrared. The multiwavelength approach to these objects has shown that they are advanced mergers of gas-rich spiral galaxies.…
Context. One of the primary goals of Galactic Archaeology is to reconstruct the Milky Way's accretion history. To achieve this, significant efforts have been dedicated to identifying signatures of past accretion events. In particular, the…
Predicting the merger timescale ($\tau_{\rm merge}$) of merging dark matter halos, based on their orbital parameters and the structural properties of their hosts, is a fundamental problem in gravitational dynamics that has important…
I review observational studies of the large-scale star formation process in nearby galaxies. A wealth of new multi-wavelength data provide an unprecedented view on the interplay of the interstellar medium and (young) stellar populations on…
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…
In the cold dark matter model of structure formation, galaxies are assembled hierarchically from mergers and the accretion of subclumps. This process is expected to leave residual substructure in the Galactic dark halo, including partially…
Since the chemical abundances of stars are the fossil records of the physical conditions in galaxies, they provide the key information for recovering the assembly history of galaxies. In this work, we explore the chemo-chrono-kinematics of…
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…
With the goal to refine modelling of shell galaxies and the use of shells to probe the merger history, we develop a new method for implementing dynamical friction in test-particle simulations of radial minor mergers. The friction is…
In the past decade, surveys of the stellar component of the Galaxy have revealed a number of streams from tidally disrupted dwarf galaxies and globular clusters. Simulations of hierarchical structure formation in LCDM cosmologies predict…
In the context of the current $\Lambda$CDM cosmological model small dark matter haloes are abundant and satellites of dwarf galaxies are expected to be predominantly dark. Since low mass galaxies have smaller baryon fractions interactions…
We present an empirical approach for interpreting gravitational wave signals of binary black hole mergers under the assumption that the underlying black hole population is sourced by remnants of stellar evolution. Using the observed…
Several lines of evidence suggest that as dark matter haloes grow their scale radius increases, and that the density in their central region drops. Major mergers seem an obvious mechanism to explain both these phenomena, and the resulting…
Galactic collisions trigger a number of phenomena, such as transportation inward of gas from distances of up to kiloparsecs from the center of a galaxy to the nuclear region, fuelling a central starburst or nuclear activity. The inverse…
While mergers between massive galaxies and their dwarf satellites are well studied, the properties of dwarf - dwarf satellite mergers are not well constrained. Stellar streams trace satellite disruption and, in the dwarf galaxy regime, are…
The merging history of galaxies can be traced with studies of dynamically close pairs. These consist of a massive primary galaxy and a less massive secondary (or satellite) galaxy. The study of the stellar populations of secondary (lower…
Advances on the formation and survival of the so-called Tidal Dwarf Galaxies (TDGs) are reviewed. The understanding on how objects of the mass of dwarf galaxies may form in debris of galactic collisions has recently benefited from the…
A significant fraction of clusters of galaxies are observed to have substructure, which implies that merging between clusters and subclusters is a rather common physical process of cluster formation. It still remains unclear how cluster…
Galaxies form and evolve in the context of their local and large-scale environments. Their baryonic content that we observe with imaging and spectroscopy is intimately connected to the properties of their dark matter halos, and to their…