Related papers: Merger driven ULIRG-QSO evolution: The case of 3C …
We present HST WFPC2 V band imaging for 23 Ultraluminous Infrared Galaxies taken from the QDOT redshift survey. The fraction of sources observed to be interacting is 87%. Most of the merging systems show a number of compact `knots', whose…
We present the results of an Eulerian adaptive mesh refinement (AMR) hydrodynamical and N-body simulation in a $\Lambda$CDM cosmology. The simulation incorporates common cooling and heating processes for primordial gas. A specific halo…
We present results from two mid-infrared imaging programs of ultraluminous infrared galaxies (ULIRGs) and fine-structure elliptical galaxies. The former are known to nearly all be recent mergers between two gas-rich spiral galaxies, while…
Ground-based high spatial-resolution optical and near-IR imaging at BIHK' is presented for a complete sample of optically selected Palomar-Green QSOs which have infrared excesses at least as great as those of "warm" AGN-like ultraluminous…
We have made an attempt to compile all currently available data on optically identified QSO absorber systems (Lindner et al. 1996) to establish the status quo of absorber galaxy data as a basis for the investigation of galaxy evolution. We…
Numerical simulations of galaxy mergers are a powerful tool to study these fundamental events in the hierarchical built-up of galaxies. Recent progress have been made owing to improved modeling, increased resolution and large statistical…
We present results from our Very Large Telescope large program to study the dynamical evolution of local Ultraluminous Infrared Galaxies (ULIRGs) and QSOs. This paper is the second in a series presenting the stellar kinematics of 54 ULIRGs,…
Recent work has studied the interplay between a galaxy's history and its observable properties using "genetically modified" cosmological zoom simulations. The approach systematically generates alternative histories for a halo, while keeping…
We have used the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) to study a large sample of ultraluminous IR galaxies (ULIRGs). With a rich legacy database of 150 high-resolution images, we are studying the fine-scale structure of this unique collection of…
We analyse N-body galaxy merger experiments involving disc galaxies. Mergers of disc-bulge-halo models are compared to those of bulge-less, disc-halo models to quantify the effects of the central bulge on the merger dynamics and on the…
Older and more recent pieces of observational evidence suggest a strong connection between QSOs and galaxies; in particular, the recently discovered correlation between black hole and galactic bulge masses suggests that QSO activity is…
We systematically explore the evolution of the merger of two carbon-oxygen (CO) white dwarfs. The dynamical evolution of a 0.9 Msun + 0.6 Msun CO white dwarf merger is followed by a three-dimensional SPH simulation. We use an elaborate…
We present a project aimed at studying the structure, dust distribution, ionization state, and kinematics of a representative sample of 22 ULIRGs. The galaxies in the sample undergo different merger phases (they are evenly divided between…
Attempts of Magain et al (2005) to detect the host galaxy of the bright QSO HE0450--2958 have not been successful. We suggest that the supermassive black hole powering the QSO was ejected from the observed ULIRG at the same redshift and at…
(Abridged) The luminous z=0.286 quasar HE0450-2958 is interacting with a companion galaxy at 6.5 kpc distance and the whole system is a ULIRG. A so far undetected host galaxy triggered the hypothesis of a mostly "naked" black hole (BH)…
We present our preliminary results on the study of the high luminosity ULIRGs (log(LFIR) > 12.3) in the 1Jy sample. Deep, high resolution optical R images with 7 arcmin x 7 arcmin field of view for 2/3 of the whole sample, show that they…
The current picture of galaxy evolution advocates co-evolution of galaxies and their nuclear massive black holes (MBHs), through accretion and merging. Quasar pairs (6,000-300,000 light-years separation) exemplify the first stages of this…
We uncover late-time gravitational-wave tails in fully nonlinear 3+1 dimensional numerical relativity simulations of merging black holes, using the highly accurate SpEC code. We achieve this result by exploiting the strong magnification of…
We present results from an on-going Hubble Space Telescope (HST) survey of a large sample of ULIRGs (Ultra-Luminous IR Galaxies). New ground-based observations are now being used to complement the HST data and to assist in the…
For the first time we study the Eastern nucleus in greater detail and search for the more extended emission in the molecular gas in different CO line transitions of the famous ULIRG Arp 220. Furthermore we present a model of the merger in…