Related papers: The Evolving Structure of Galactic Disks
Increasingly large populations of disk galaxies are now being observed at increasingly high redshifts, providing new constraints on our knowledge of how such galaxies evolve. Are these observations consistent with a cosmology in which…
Despite having entered the era of "precision cosmology," the formation of galaxies within the favored CDM cosmological paradigm remains problematic. By relating our N-body/smooth particle hydro-dynamical simulation to an extensive range of…
Recent observations have shown that star-forming galaxies like our own Milky Way evolve kinematically into ordered thin disks over the last ~8 billion years since z=1.2, undergoing a process of "disk settling." For the first time, we study…
The formation of thick stellar disks in spiral galaxies is studied. Simulations of gas-rich young galaxies show formation of internal clumps by gravitational instabilities, clump coalescence into a bulge, and disk thickening by strong…
The morphologies of disk galaxies begin to deviate systematically from those of nearby galaxies at surprisingly low redshifts, possibly as low as z=0.3. This corresponds to a time ~3.5 Gyr in the past, which is only one quarter of the…
High resolution gravity plus smoothed particle hydrodynamics simulations are used to study the formation of galaxies within the context of hierarchical structure formation. The simulations have sufficient dynamic range to resolve from ten…
The analysis of disk formation is based on the White & Rees (1978) picture, in which disk galaxies form by continuous cooling and accretion of gas within a merging hierarchy of dark matter halos. A simple Kennicutt law of star formation for…
Based on VLT/FORS spectroscopy and HST/ACS imaging, we have constructed a sample of ~200 field spiral galaxies that cover redshifts up to z~1. Such a large data set allows to study the evolution of fundamental galaxy parameters like…
Results from simulations of hierarchical structure formation cosmology provide a tool to develop an evolutionary model of regular magnetic fields coupled to galaxy formation and evolution. We use the dynamo theory to derive the timescales…
A sample of very high resolution cosmological disk galaxy simulations is used to investigate the evolution of galaxy disk sizes back to redshift 1 within the Lambda CDM cosmology. Artificial images in the rest frame B band are generated,…
We review some of our recent progress in modelling the formation of disk galaxies in the framework of hierarchical structure formation. Our model is not only consistent with the local observations, but also provides a good description of…
Although thick disk is a structure prevalent in local disk galaxies and also present in our home Galaxy, its formation and evolution is still unclear. Whether the thick disk is born thick and/or gradually heated to be thick after formation…
In this contribution, I present a simplified overview of the evolution of the disk galaxy population since z=1, and a brief discussion of a few open questions. Galaxy evolution surveys have found that the disk galaxy population forms stars…
We develop a detailed model of the Milky Way (a ``prototypical'' disk galaxy) and extend it to other disks with the help of some simple scaling relations, obtained in the framework of Cold Dark Matter models. This phenomenological…
We study the growth of stellar discs of Milky Way-sized galaxies using a suite of cosmological simulations. We calculate the half-mass axis lengths and axis ratios of stellar populations split by age in isolated galaxies with stellar mass…
We use recent observations of high-redshift galaxies to study the evolution of galactic disks over the redshift range 0<z<1. The data are inconsistent with models in which disks were already assembled at z=1 and have evolved only in…
We compare the star-formation history and dynamics of the Milky Way (MW) with the properties of distant disk galaxies. During the first ~4 Gyr of its evolution, the MW formed stars with a high star-formation intensity (SFI), Sigma_SFR~0.6…
Galaxies above redshift 1 can be very clumpy, with irregular morphologies dominated by star complexes as large as 2 kpc and as massive as a few 10^8 or 10^9 Mo. Their co-moving densities and rapid evolution suggest that most present-day…
We examine the chemical and dynamical structure in the solar neighbourhood of a model Galaxy that is the endpoint of a simulation of the chemical evolution of the Milky Way in the presence of radial mixing of stars and gas. Although the…
We have carried out a joint photometric and structural analysis of red sequence galaxies in four clusters at a mean redshift of z ~ 1.25 using optical and near-IR HST imaging reaching to at least 3 magnitudes fainter than $M^*$. As…