Related papers: Kinematics of elliptical galaxies with a diffuse d…
I present various projects to study the halo dynamics of elliptical galaxies. This allows one to study the outer mass and orbital distributions of ellipticals in different environments, and the inner distributions of groups and clusters…
We present a model for the diffuse interstellar dust that explains the observed wavelength-dependence of extinction, emission, linear and circular polarisation of light. The model is set-up with a small number of parameters. It consists of…
Recent results from gravitational lensing are combined with new modeling of the stellar velocity distributions in nearby galaxies to probe the connection between the luminous and the dark matter in elliptical galaxies. From analysing a…
We present a multiphase model for the evolution of elliptical galaxies. Diffuse gas, molecular clouds, stars and remnants are taken into account. Cloud--cloud collisions and stimulated processes are the main causes of star formation. The…
Dust grains play a central role in the physics and chemistry of cosmic environments. They influence the optical and thermal properties of the medium due to their interaction with stellar radiation; provide surfaces for the chemical…
Massive early-type galaxies have undergone dramatic structural evolution over the last 10 Gyr. A companion paper shows that nearby elliptical galaxies with M*>1.3x10^{11} M_sun generically contain three photometric subcomponents: a compact…
Dust grains have been detected in various astronomical objects. Interpretation of observations of dusty objects includes three components: 1) determination of the materials which can exist in the solid phase and the measurements or…
We present molecular gas mass estimates for a sample of 13 local galaxies whose kinematic and star forming properties closely resemble those observed in $z\approx 1.5$ main-sequence galaxies. Plateau de Bure observations of the CO[1-0]…
The wavelength dependences of interstellar extinction and polarization, supplemented by observed elemental abundances and the spectrum of infrared emission from dust heated by starlight, strongly constrain dust models. One dust model that…
The mechanism by which galaxies stop forming stars and get rid of their interstellar medium (ISM) remains elusive. Here, we study a sample of more than two thousand elliptical galaxies in which dust emission has been detected. This is the…
Early-type galaxies exhibit thermal and molecular resonance emission from dust that is shed and heated through stellar mass loss as a subset of the population moves through the AGB phase of evolution. Because this emission can give direct…
The luminosity dependence of kinematical and isophotal properties of elliptical galaxies is investigated using numerical simulations of galaxy merging, combined with semi-analytical models of hierarchical structure formation. Mergers of…
To understand the origin of dust in the circum-galactic medium (CGM), we develop a dust enrichment model. We describe each of the central galaxy and its CGM as a single zone, and consider the mass exchange between them through galactic…
Complex plasmas consist of microparticles embedded in a low-temperature plasma and allow investigating various effects by tracing the motion of these microparticles. Dust density waves appear in complex plasmas as self-excited acoustic…
Our ability to interpret observations of galaxies and trace their stellar, gas, and dust content over cosmic time critically relies on our understanding of how the dust abundance and properties vary with environment. Here, we compute the…
We study the variation of the dark matter mass fraction of elliptical galaxies as a function of their luminosity, stellar mass, and size using a sample of 29,469 elliptical galaxies culled from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. We model…
We construct stable axially symmetric models of elliptical galaxies. The particle density on phase space for these models depends monotonically on the particle energy and on the third component of the angular momentum. They are obtained as…
We introduce a new approach to quantifying dust in galaxies by combining information from the Balmer decrement (BD) and the dust mass ($M_d$). While there is no explicit correlation between these two properties, they jointly probe different…
Dust is a key component of galaxies, but its properties during the earliest eras of structure formation remain elusive. Here we present a simple semi-analytic model of the dust distribution in galaxies at $z \gtrsim 5$. We calibrate the…
We develop a dust efflux model of radiation pressure acting on dust grains which successfully reproduces the relation between stellar mass, dust opacity and star formation rate observed in local star-forming galaxies. The dust content of…