Related papers: Galaxy Formation and Large Scale Structure
The latest observations of molecular gas and the atomic hydrogen content of local and high-redshift galaxies, coupled with how these correlate with star formation activity, have revolutionized our ideas about how to model star formation in…
Hierarchical models of galaxy formation now provide a much closer match to observations than they did a few years ago. The progress has been achieved by adjusting the description of baryonic processes such as star formation and…
Our vision of galaxies has changed significantly since the era of large galaxy surveys like the Sloan, which gave us extensive statistics with millions of galaxies. The Hubble sequence classification described in Chapter 1 still remains…
Many clues about the galaxy assembly process lurk in the faint outer regions of galaxies. Although quantitative study of these parts has been severely limited in the past, breakthroughs are now being made thanks to the combination of…
Galaxies are not distributed randomly throughout space but are instead arranged in an intricate "cosmic web" of filaments and walls surrounding bubble-like voids. There is still no compelling observational evidence of a link between 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 Cold Dark Matter theory of gravitationally-driven hierarchical structure formation has earned its status as a paradigm by explaining the distribution of matter over large spans of cosmic distance and time. However, its central tenet,…
We show that recently documented trends in galaxy sizes with mass and redshift can be understood in terms of the influence of underlying cosmic evolution; a holistic view which is complimentary to interpretations involving the accumulation…
The hierarchical theory of galaxy formation rests on the idea that smaller galactic structures merge to form the galaxies that we see today. The past decade has provided remarkable observational support for this scenario, driven in part by…
A new model for the formation of active galaxies is described. A key feature of this model is the idea that the birth of black holes in the centers of supergiant galaxies is strongly influenced by the large-scale distribution of matter in…
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…
We discuss some of the key open questions regarding the formation and evolution of globular clusters (GCs) during galaxy formation and assembly within a cosmological framework. The current state-of-the-art for both observations and…
The way galaxies assemble their mass to form the well-defined Hubble sequence is amongst the most debated topic in modern cosmology. One difficulty is to link distant galaxies to those at present epoch. We aim at establishing how were the…
Our galaxy is full with planets. We now know that planets and planetary systems are diverse and come with different sizes, masses and compositions, as well as various orbital architectures. Although there has been great progress in…
The history of the formation and evolution of the Milky Way Galaxy is found in the spatial distribution, kinematics, age and chemical abundance distributions of long-lived stars. From this fossil record one can in principle extract the star…
Galaxy structure and morphology is nearly always studied using the light originating from stars, however ideally one is interested in measuring structure using the stellar mass distribution. Not only does stellar mass trace out the…
The bulge is a region of the Galaxy of tremendous interest for understanding galaxy formation. However measuring photometry and kinematics in it raises several inherent issues, such as severe crowding and high extinction in the visible.…
It is currently believed that galaxies were assembled via chaotic hierarchical mergers between massive cold dark matter halos, in which baryonic star forming matter was embedded. One would therefore expect the properties of individual…
Spiral galaxies offer a unique opportunity to study the role of star formation in galaxy evolution and to test various theoretical star formation schemes. I review some recent relevant work on the evolution of spiral galaxies. Detailed…
The emerging empirical picture of galaxy stellar mass (Ms) assembly shows that galaxy population buildup proceeds from top to down in Ms. By connecting galaxies to LCDM halos and their histories, individual (average) Ms growth tracks can be…