Related papers: Gas Rich Mergers in Disk Formation
We suggest that the bulge-to-disc ratios of spiral galaxies are primarily determined by the angular momenta of their host haloes predicted in current hierarchical clustering models for structure formation. Gas with low specific angular…
We present a detailed prescription for how galaxy formation can be modelled in hierarchical theories of structure formation. Our model incorporates the formation and merging of dark matter halos, the shock heating and radiative cooling of…
Disk galaxies are common in our universe and this is a source of concern for hierarchical formation models like LCDM. Here we investigate this issue as motivated by raw merger statistics derived for galaxy-size dark matter halos from LCDM…
The build up of heavy elements and the stellar mass assembly are fundamental processes in the formation and evolution of galaxies. Although they have been extensively studied through observations and simulations, the key elements that…
Merging systems at low redshift provide the unique opportunity to study the processes related to star formation in a variety of environments that presumably resemble those seen at higher redshifts. Previous studies of distant starbursting…
Spiral galaxies have most of their stellar mass in a large rotating disk, and only a modest fraction in a central spheroidal bulge. This poses a major challenge for cosmological models of galaxy formation. Galaxies form at the centre of…
Most phenomenological galaxy formation models show a discrepancy between the predicted Tully-Fisher relation and the luminosity function. We show that this is mainly due to overmerging of galaxy haloes, which is inherent in both the…
The link between massive red galaxies in the local Universe and star-forming galaxies at high redshift is investigated with a semi-analytic model that has proven successful in many ways, e.g. explaining the galaxy colour-magnitude…
The stellar populations of the stellar halo and of the thick disk of the Milky Way reveal much about the merging history that our Galaxy, a typical large disk galaxy, has experienced. Our current understanding, described here, implies a…
Supermassive primordial stars with masses exceeding $\sim10^5\,M_{\odot}$ that form in atomically cooled halos are the leading candidates for the origin of high-redshift quasars with $z>6$. Recent numerical simulations, however, find that…
The mass assembly of galaxies can proceed through different physical processes. Here we report on the spectroscopic identification of close physical pairs of galaxies at redshifts 2 <z < 4 and discuss the impact of major mergers in shaping…
We extend existing semi-analytic models of galaxy formation to track atomic and molecular gas in disk galaxies. Simple recipes for processes such as cooling, star formation, supernova feedback, and chemical enrichment of the stars and gas…
We present the results of a series of empirical computations regarding the role of major mergers in forming the stellar masses of modern galaxies based on measurements of galaxy merger and star formation histories from z~0.5-3. We…
We study in detail how massive galaxies accrete gas through cosmic time using cosmological hydrodynamical simulations from the High-z Evolution of Large and Luminous Objects (HELLO) and the Numerical Investigation of a Hundred Astrophysical…
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…
A key unresolved question is the role that galaxy mergers play in driving stellar mass growth over cosmic time. Recent observational work hints at the possibility that the overall contribution of `major' mergers (mass ratios $\gtrsim$1:4)…
This review focuses on how galaxies and their globular cluster systems form. I first discuss the now fairly convincing evidence that some globular clusters form in galaxy starbursts/mergers. One way these observations are valuable is they…
Circumstellar disks are an essential ingredient of the formation of low-mass stars. It is unclear, however, whether the accretion-disk paradigm can also account for the formation of stars more massive than about 10 solar masses, in which…
We present first results concerning the metallicities and stellar populations of galaxies formed in a cosmologically motivated simulation. The calculations include dark matter, gas dynamics, radiation processes, star formation, supernovae…
I discuss how the chemical abundance distributions, kinematics and age distributions of stars in the thin and thick disks of the Galaxy can be used to decipher the merger history of the Milky Way, a typical large galaxy. The observational…