Related papers: Galaxy Collisions
Over the past three decades the established view of a nearly homogeneuous, featureless Universe on scales larger than a few Megaparsec has been completely overhauled. In particular through the advent of ever larger galaxy redshift surveys…
Interacting galaxies favor the formation of star clusters but are also suspected to affect their evolution through an intense and rapidly varying tidal field. Treating this complex behaviour remains out-of-reach of (semi-)analytical…
This paper addresses the questions of what we have learned about how and when dense star clusters form, and what studies of star clusters have revealed about galaxy formation and evolution. One important observation is that globular…
In a Lambda CDM Universe, galaxies grow in mass both through star formation and through addition of already-formed stars in galaxy mergers. Because of this partial decoupling of these two modes of galaxy growth, I discuss each separately in…
Galaxy morphology has many structures that are suggestive of various processes or stages of secular evolution. Internal perturbations such as bars can drive secular evolution through gravity torques that move gas into the central regions…
We study the shape and evolution of the star formation main sequence in three independently developed semi-analytic models of galaxy formation. We focus, in particular, on the characterization of the model galaxies that are significantly…
In the standard cosmological paradigm, structure formation occurs via gravitational encounters and mergers between galaxies and dark matter halos. These collisionless self-gravitating systems therefore prevail in a state of non-equilibrium…
I review the current state of our understanding of the galaxy formation and evolution process from the modeler's perspective. With the advent of the cold dark matter model and the support of fast computers and advanced simulation…
I review recent observational progress concerning the evolution of the morphological distribution of galaxies in the rich cluster environment and in the faint field population. By coupling HST imagery with ground-based spectroscopic…
It is now a well established fact that galaxies undergo significant morphological transformation during their lifetimes, manifesting as an evolution along the Hubble sequence from the late to the early Hubble types. The physical processes…
In current $\Lambda$CDM galaxy formation scenarios, at least three physical phenomena could contribute to the mass assembly: monolithic collapse, hierarchical mergers and more quiescent external gas accretion, with secular evolution. The…
Timescales in astronomy comprise the largest range of any scientific discipline. In the construction of physical models, this circumstance may both be a blessing and a curse. For example, galaxy evolution occurs on typical timescales of…
Understanding how galaxies obtain baryons, their stars and gas, over cosmic time is traditionally approached in two different ways - theoretically and observationally. In general, observational approaches to galaxy formation include…
The morphological classification of galaxies provides vital physical information about the orbital motions of stars in galaxies, and correlates in interesting ways with star formation history, and other physical properties. Galaxy…
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…
Their ubiquity and extreme densities make star clusters probes of prime importance of galaxy evolution. Old globular clusters keep imprints of the physical conditions of their assembly in the early Universe, and younger stellar objects,…
Dense star clusters are spectacular self-gravitating stellar systems in our Galaxy and across the Universe - in many respects. They populate disks and spheroids of galaxies as well as almost every galactic center. In massive elliptical…
A timely combination of new theoretical ideas and observational discoveries has brought about significant advances in our understanding of cosmic evolution. Computer simulations have played a key role in these developments by providing the…
The traditional view of the morphology-spin connection is being challenged by recent integral-field-unit observations, as the majority of early-type galaxies are found to have a rotational component that is often as large as a dispersion…
Galaxy interactions and mergers play a significant, but still debated and poorly understood role in the star formation history of galaxies. Numerical and theoretical models cannot yet explain the main properties of merger-induced…