We present a hydrodynamical simulation of an Antennae-like galaxy merger at parsec resolution, including a multicomponent model for stellar feedback and reaching numerical convergence in the global ...star formation rate for the first time. We analyse the properties of the dense stellar objects formed during the different stages of the interaction. Each galactic encounter triggers a starburst activity, but the varying physical conditions change the triggering mechanism of each starburst. During the first two pericentre passages, the starburst is spatially extended and forms many star clusters. However, the starburst associated with the third, final passage is more centrally concentrated: stars form almost exclusively in the galactic nucleus and no new star cluster is formed. The maximum mass of stars clusters in this merger is more than 30 times higher than those in a simulation of an isolated Milky Way-like galaxy. Antennae-like mergers are therefore a formation channel of young massive clusters possibly leading to globular clusters. Monitoring the evolution of a few clusters reveals the diversity of formation scenarios including the gathering and merger of gas clumps, the monolithic formation and the hierarchical formation in sub-structures inside a single cloud. Two stellar objects formed in the simulation yield the same properties as ultracompact dwarf galaxies. They share the same formation scenario than the most massive clusters, but have a larger radius either since birth, or get it after a violent interaction with the galactic centre. The diversity of environments across space and time in a galaxy merger can account for the diversity of the stellar objects formed, both in terms of mass and size.
Several detailed observations, such as those carried out at the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope (CFHT), have revealed prominent Low Surface Brightness (LSB) fine structures that lead to a change in ...the apparent morphology of galaxies. Previous photometry surveys have developed observational techniques which make use of the diffuse light detected in the external regions of galaxies. In these studies, the outer perturbations have been identified and classified. These include tidal tails, stellar streams, and shells. These structures serve as tracers for interacting events and merging events and retain some memory of the mass assembly of galaxies. Cosmological numerical simulations are required to estimate their visibility timescale, among other properties, in order to reconstruct the merger history of galaxies. In the present work, we analyze a hydrodynamical cosmological simulation to build up a comprehensive interpretation of the properties of fine structures. We present a census of several types of LSB fine structures compiled using a visual inspection of individual snapshots at various points in time. We reconstruct the evolution of the number of fine structures detected around an early-type galaxy and we compare it with the merger history of the galaxy. We find that most fine structures are associated with major and intermediate mass merger events. Their survival timescale ranges between 0.7 and 4 Gyr. Shells and streams remain visible for a longer time, while tidal tails have a shorter lifetime. These estimates for the survival time of collisional debris provide clues for the interpretation of the shape and frequency of fine structures observed in deep images with regard to their mass assembly. We find that the detectability of stellar streams is most sensitive at the surface brightness limit, demonstrating greater visibility at the deepest surface brightness level used in our simulation. We see between two and three times more streams based on a surface brightness cut of 33 mag arcsec−2 than with 29 mag arcsec−2. We find that the detection of shells is strongly dependent upon the projection angle.
Using parsec-resolution simulations of a typical galaxy merger, we study the triggering of starbursts by connecting the (inter-)galactic dynamics to the structure of the interstellar medium. The ...gravitational encounter between two galaxies enhances tidal compression over large volumes, which increases and modifies the turbulence, in particular its compressive mode with respect to the solenoidal one. This generates an excess of dense gas leading to intense star formation activity. Along the interaction, the compressive turbulence modifies the efficiency of gas-to-star conversion which, in the Schmidt–Kennicutt diagram, drives the galaxies from the sequence of discs to that of starbursts.
The cultivation of legumes shows promise for the development of sustainable agriculture, but yield instability remains one of the main obstacles for its adoption. Here, we tested whether the yield ...stability (i.e., resistance and resilience) of pea plants subjected to drought could be enhanced by soil microbial diversity. We used a dilution approach to manipulate the microbial diversity, with a genotype approach to distinguish the effect of symbionts from that of microbial diversity as a whole. We investigated the physiology of plants in response to drought when grown on a soil containing high or low level of microbial diversity. Plants grown under high microbial diversity displayed higher productivity and greater resilience after drought. Yield losses were mitigated by 15% on average in the presence of high soil microbial diversity at sowing. Our study provides proof of concept that the soil microbial community as a whole plays a key role for yield stability after drought even in plant species living in relationships with microbial symbionts. These results emphasize the need to restore soil biodiversity for sustainable crop management and climate change adaptation.
Plants grown under high microbial diversity display higher productivity and better resilience after drought. We provide proof of concept that the soil microbial community as a whole plays a key role in plant stability under drought even in plant species supporting microbial symbiotic relationships.
We present the largest publicly available catalog of interacting dwarf galaxies. It includes 177 nearby merging dwarf galaxies of stellar mass M* < 1010 M and redshifts z < 0.02. These galaxies are ...selected by visual inspection of publicly available archival imaging from two wide-field optical surveys (SDSS-III and the Legacy Survey), and they possess low-surface-brightness features that are likely the result of an interaction between dwarf galaxies. We list UV and optical photometric data that we use to estimate stellar masses and star formation rates. So far, the study of interacting dwarf galaxies has largely been done on an individual basis, and lacks a sufficiently large catalog to give statistics on the properties of interacting dwarf galaxies, and their role in the evolution of low-mass galaxies. We expect that this public catalog can be used as a reference sample to investigate the effects of the tidal interaction on the evolution of star formation, and the morphology/structure of dwarf galaxies. Our sample is overwhelmingly dominated by star-forming galaxies, and they are generally found significantly below the red sequence in the color-magnitude relation. The number of early-type galaxies is only 3 out of 177. We classify them, according to observed low-surface-brightness features, into various categories including shells, stellar streams, loops, antennae, or simply interacting. We find that dwarf-dwarf interactions tend to prefer the low-density environment. Only 41 out of the 177 candidate dwarf-dwarf interaction systems have giant neighbors within a sky-projected distance of 700 kpc and a line-of-sight radial velocity range 700 km s−1, and compared to the LMC-SMC, they are generally located at much larger sky-projected distances from their nearest giant neighbors.
Much of our knowledge of galaxies comes from analysing the radiation emitted by their stars, which depends on the present number of each type of star in the galaxy. The present number depends on the ...stellar initial mass function (IMF), which describes the distribution of stellar masses when the population formed, and knowledge of it is critical to almost every aspect of galaxy evolution. More than 50 years after the first IMF determination, no consensus has emerged on whether it is universal among different types of galaxies. Previous studies indicated that the IMF and the dark matter fraction in galaxy centres cannot both be universal, but they could not convincingly discriminate between the two possibilities. Only recently were indications found that massive elliptical galaxies may not have the same IMF as the Milky Way. Here we report a study of the two-dimensional stellar kinematics for the large representative ATLAS(3D) sample of nearby early-type galaxies spanning two orders of magnitude in stellar mass, using detailed dynamical models. We find a strong systematic variation in IMF in early-type galaxies as a function of their stellar mass-to-light ratios, producing differences of a factor of up to three in galactic stellar mass. This implies that a galaxy's IMF depends intimately on the galaxy's formation history.
Celotno besedilo
Dostopno za:
DOBA, IJS, IZUM, KILJ, KISLJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, SIK, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
Using deep, high-resolution optical imaging from the Next Generation Virgo Cluster Survey, we study the properties of nuclear star clusters (NSCs) in a sample of nearly 400 quiescent galaxies in the ...core of Virgo with stellar masses 105 / 1012. The nucleation fraction reaches a peak value fn 90% for 109 galaxies and declines for both higher and lower masses, but nuclei populate galaxies as small as 5 × 105 . Comparison with literature data for nearby groups and clusters shows that at the low-mass end nucleation is more frequent in denser environments. The NSC mass function peaks at MNSC 7 × 105 , a factor 3-4 times larger than the turnover mass for globular clusters (GCs). We find a nonlinear relation between the stellar masses of NSCs and those of their host galaxies, with a mean nucleus-to-galaxy mass ratio that drops to MNSC/M 3.6 × 10−3 for 5 × 109 galaxies. Nuclei in both more and less massive galaxies are much more prominent: at the low-mass end, where nuclei are nearly 50% as massive as their hosts. We measure an intrinsic scatter in NSC masses at a fixed galaxy stellar mass of 0.4 dex, which we interpret as evidence that the process of NSC growth is significantly stochastic. At low galaxy masses we find a close connection between NSCs and GC systems, including very similar occupation distributions and comparable total masses. We discuss these results in the context of current dissipative and dissipationless models of NSC formation.
The MATLAS deep imaging survey has uncovered a plethora of dwarf galaxies in the low density environment it has mapped. A fraction of them are unusually extended and have low surface brightness. ...Among these so-called ultra-diffuse galaxies, a few seem to host an excess of globular clusters (GCs). With the integral field unit spectrograph MUSE we have observed one of these galaxies – MATLAS J15052031+0148447 (MATLAS-2019) – located toward the nearby group NGC 5846 and measured its systemic velocity, age, and metallicity, and that of its GC candidates. For the stellar body of MATLAS-2019 we derive a metallicity of −1.33
−0.01
+0.19
dex and an age of 11.2
−0.8
+1.8
Gyr. For some of the individual GCs and the stacked GC population, we derive consistent ages and metallicities. From the 11 confirmed GCs and using a Markov Chain Monte Carlo approach we derived a dynamical mass-to-light ratio of 4.2
−3.4
+8.6
M
⊙
/
L
⊙
. This is at the lower end of the luminosity-mass scaling relation defined by the Local Group dwarf galaxies. Furthermore, we could not confirm or reject the possibility of a rotational component in the GC system. If present, this would further modify the inferred mass. Follow-up observations of the GC population and of the stellar body of the galaxy are needed to assess whether this galaxy lacks dark matter, as was suggested for the pair of dwarf galaxies in the field of NGC 1052, or if this is a misinterpretation arising from systematic uncertainties of the method commonly used for these systems and the large uncertainties of the individual GC velocities.
The ATLAS3D project is a multiwavelength survey combined with a theoretical modelling effort. The observations span from the radio to the millimetre and optical, and provide multicolour imaging, ...two-dimensional kinematics of the atomic (H i), molecular (CO) and ionized gas (Hβ, O iii and N i), together with the kinematics and population of the stars (Hβ, Fe5015 and Mg b), for a carefully selected, volume-limited (1.16 × 105 Mpc3) sample of 260 early-type (elliptical E and lenticular S0) galaxies (ETGs). The models include semi-analytic, N-body binary mergers and cosmological simulations of galaxy formation. Here we present the science goals for the project and introduce the galaxy sample and the selection criteria. The sample consists of nearby (D < 42 Mpc, |δ− 29°| < 35°, |b| > 15°) morphologically selected ETGs extracted from a parent sample of 871 galaxies (8 per cent E, 22 per cent S0 and 70 per cent spirals) brighter than MK
< −21.5 mag (stellar mass M
★≳ 6 ×109 M⊙). We analyse possible selection biases and we conclude that the parent sample is essentially complete and statistically representative of the nearby galaxy population. We present the size-luminosity relation for the spirals and ETGs and show that the ETGs in the ATLAS3D sample define a tight red sequence in a colour-magnitude diagram, with few objects in the transition from the blue cloud. We describe the strategy of the SAURON integral field observations and the extraction of the stellar kinematics with the ppxf method. We find typical 1σ errors of ΔV≈ 6 km s−1, Δσ≈ 7 km s−1, Δh
3≈Δh
4≈ 0.03 in the mean velocity, the velocity dispersion and Gauss-Hermite (GH) moments for galaxies with effective dispersion σe≳ 120 km s−1. For galaxies with lower σe (≈40 per cent of the sample) the GH moments are gradually penalized by ppxf towards zero to suppress the noise produced by the spectral undersampling and only V and σ can be measured. We give an overview of the characteristics of the other main data sets already available for our sample and of the ongoing modelling projects.
Galactic archaeology based on star counts is instrumental to reconstruct the past mass assembly of Local Group galaxies. The development of new observing techniques and data reduction, coupled with ...the use of sensitive large field of view cameras, now allows us to pursue this technique in more distant galaxies exploiting their diffuse low surface brightness (LSB) light. As part of the ATLAS3D project, we have obtained with the MegaCam camera at the Canada–France–Hawaii Telescope extremely deep, multiband images of nearby early-type galaxies (ETGs). We present here a catalogue of 92 galaxies from the ATLAS3D sample, which are located in low- to medium-density environments. The observing strategy and data reduction pipeline, which achieve a gain of several magnitudes in the limiting surface brightness with respect to classical imaging surveys, are presented. The size and depth of the survey are compared to other recent deep imaging projects. The paper highlights the capability of LSB-optimized surveys at detecting new prominent structures that change the apparent morphology of galaxies. The intrinsic limitations of deep imaging observations are also discussed, among those, the contamination of the stellar haloes of galaxies by extended ghost reflections, and the cirrus emission from Galactic dust. The detection and systematic census of fine structures that trace the present and past mass assembly of ETGs are one of the prime goals of the project. We provide specific examples of each type of observed structures – tidal tails, stellar streams and shells – and explain how they were identified and classified. We give an overview of the initial results. The detailed statistical analysis will be presented in future papers.
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