Related papers: Elliptical Galaxy Dynamics: The Issues Pertaining …
Galactic spheroids can form as a result of galaxy interactions and mergers of disks. Detailed analyses of the photometric properties, the intrinsic orbital structure, the line-of-sight velocity distributions and the kinemetry of simulated…
Globular cluster systems provide valuable fossil records of the formation history of their parent galaxies. This review specifically concentrates on using color distributions of the globular cluster systems of elliptical galaxies to…
The evolution of galaxies is driven strongly by dynamical processes including internal instabilities, tidal interactions and mergers. The cluster environment is a useful laboratory for studying these effects. I present recent results on…
We use high resolution simulations to study the formation and distribution of galaxies within a cluster which forms hierarchically. We follow both dark matter and baryonic gas which is subject to thermal pressure, shocks and radiative…
In the last decades, extended old stellar clusters have been observed. These extended objects cover a large range in masses, from extended clusters or faint fuzzies to ultra compact dwarf galaxies. It has been demonstrated that these…
In the current galaxy formation scenarios, two physical phenomena are invoked to build disk galaxies: hierarchical mergers and more quiescent external gas accretion, coming from intergalactic filaments. Although both are thought to play a…
A review of elliptical galaxy dynamics, with a focus on nonintegrable models. Topics covered include torus construction; modelling axisymmetric galaxies; triaxiality; collisionless relaxation; and collective instabilities.
Recent spectroscopic observations of planetary nebulae (PNe) in several elliptical galaxies have revealed structural and kinematical properties of the outer stellar halo regions. In order to elucidate the origin of the properties of these…
Dedicated photometric and spectroscopic surveys have provided unambiguous evidence for a strong stellar mass-size evolution of galaxies within the last 10 Gyr. The likely progenitors of today's most massive galaxies are remarkably small,…
The spherical gravitational collapse and virialization of arbitrary density fluctuations in an expanding universe is studied. In the context of the standard cosmological model and the peak $ansatz$, disk galaxies are supposed to be the…
We present spatially-resolved two-dimensional maps and radial trends of the stellar populations and kinematics for a sample of six compact elliptical galaxies (cE) using spectroscopy from the Keck Cosmic Web Imager (KCWI). We recover their…
To solve some problems of celestial mechanics and astrophysics, three new models of an elliptical galaxy (EG) have been created, which are in good agreement with modern understanding of the structure of such galaxies. Based on these models,…
Galaxies exhibit a sequence of various morphological types, i.e., the Hubble sequence, and they are basically composed of spheroidal components (elliptical galaxies and bulges in spiral galaxies) and disks. It is known that spheroidal…
A new view on our Galaxy has recently emerged, with large consequences on its formation scenarios. Not only new dwarf satellites have been detected, still orbiting and tidally disrupting, but also a multitude of stellar streams or tidal…
The current understanding of galaxy formation is that it proceeds in a 'bottom up' way, with the formation of small clumps of gas and stars that merge hierarchically until giant galaxies are built up. The baryonic gas loses the thermal…
Early-type galaxies (ETGs) are composed of two distinct populations: high-mass and low-mass, which are likely to be built via gas-poor merging and gas-rich merging/accretion, respectively. However, it is difficult to directly associate…
It is shown that compact groups of galaxies (HCGs, ShCGS) are stable formations, in which principal member galaxies together with faint galaxies in their environment rotate in elongated orbits around the common gravitational center of the…
Some factors connecting the evolutionary histories of galaxies with the characteristics of their cluster systems are reviewed. Unanswered questions include: How is one to understand the observation that some globular cluster systems have…
Current theories of galaxy formation have tended to focus on hierarchical structure formation, which is the most likely scenario for cosmological models with lots of power at small scales (e.g. standard cold dark matter). Models with little…
Recent progress in the dynamical analysis of elliptical galaxy kinematics is reviewed. Results reported briefly include (i) the surprisingly uniform anisotropy structure of luminous ellipticals, (ii) their nearly flat (to $\sim 2R_e$)…