We focused on the stellar age-velocity dispersion relation (AVR). We performed the N-body/SPH simulations to investigate the origin of AVR. As a results, we found that AVR is not consistent with simple stellar heating.

In this short write-up, I will concentrate on a few topics of interest. In the 1970s I found very extended HI disks in galaxies such as NGC 5055 and NGC 2841, out to 2 - 2.5 times the Holmberg radius. Since these galaxies are warped, a “tilted ring model” allows rotation curves to be derived, and evidence for dark matter to be found. The evaluation of the amount of dark matter is hampered by a disk-halo degeneracy, which can possibly be broken by observations of velocity dispersions in both the MgI region and the CaII region.

Of the three kinds of neutral gas found outside the stellar disks of Local Group galaxies, only the products of interaction, like the Magellanic Stream, have a clearly understandable origin. Both the high-velocity clouds and the faint H I between M31 and M33 remain a mystery. New observations of the region between M31 and M33 with the Green Bank Telescope show that the H I there resides in clouds with a size and mass similar to that of dwarf galaxies, but without stars. These clouds might be products of an interaction, or condensations in the hot circumgalactic medium of M31, but both these models have difficulties. The prevalence of clouds like this in the Local Group remains to be determined.

The current IAU Symposium is closely connected to the EU-funded network DAGAL (Detailed Anatomy of Galaxies), with the final annual network meeting of DAGAL being at the core of this international symposium. In this short paper, we give an overview of DAGAL, its training activities, and some of the scientific advances that have been made under its umbrella.

Detection of optical surface brightness structures with magnitudes fainter than 30 mag/arcsec2 has remained elusive in current photometric deep surveys. We are conducting a new imaging strategy to cross that frontier and address the study of outskirts of galaxies and theories of galaxy formation.

In this work we study the effect of satellite accretion on the building-up of the radial stellar age distribution in the discs of spiral galaxies. In addition, we analyse its effect on other chemical and dynamical properties of these systems up to their outskirts.

Local analog galaxies play an important role in understanding the properties of high-redshift galaxies. We present a method to select a type of local analog that closely resembles the ionized interstellar medium conditions in high-redshift galaxies. These galaxies are selected based on their locations in the [O III]/Hβ versus [N II]/Hα nebular emission-line diagnostic diagram. The ionization parameters and electron densities in these analogs are comparable to those in z ≃ 2 − 3 galaxies, but higher than those in normal SDSS galaxies by ≃ 0.6 dex and ≃ 0.9 dex, respectively. We find that the high sSFR and SFR surface density can enhance the electron densities and the ionization parameters, but still cannot fully explain the difference in ISM condition between nearby galaxies and the local analogs/high-redshift galaxies.

Recent chemical abundance measurements of damped Lyman-alpha absorbers (DLAs) revealed a large intrinsic scatter in their metallicities. We discuss a semi-analytic model that was specifically designed to study this scatter by tracing the chemical evolution of the interstellar matter in small regions of the Universe with different mean density, from over- to underdense regions. It is shown that different histories of structure formation in these regions are reflected in the chemical properties of the proto-galaxies. We also address deuterium abundance measurements, which constitute a complementary probe of the star formation and infall histories.

We investigate the structure and dynamics of the Milky Way (MW) disk stars based on the analysis of the Apache Point Observatory Galactic Evolution Experiment (APOGEE) data, to infer the past evolution histories of the MW disk component(s) possibly affected by radial migration and/or satellite accretions. APOGEE is the first near-infrared spectroscopic survey for a large number of the MW disk stars, providing their radial velocities and chemical abundances without significant dust extinction effects. We here adopt red-clump (RC) stars (Bovy et al. 2014), for which the distances from the Sun are determined precisely, and analyze their radial velocities and chemical abundances in the MW disk regions covering from the Galactocentric distance, R, of 5 kpc to 14 kpc. We investigate their dynamical properties, such as mean rotational velocities, 〈V φ〉 and velocity dispersions, as a function of R, based on the MCMC Bayesian method. We find that at all radii, the dynamics of alpha-poor stars, which are candidates of young disk stars, is much different from that of alpha-rich stars, which are candidates of old disk stars. We find that our Jeans analysis for our sample stars reveals characteristic spatial and dynamical properties of the MW disk, which are generally in agreement with the recent independent work by Bovy et al. (2015) but with a different method from ours.

This project is aimed at understanding the dependence of star formation on the environment by analysing young stellar populations in two very different positions in disk galaxies: circumnuclear and outer disk giant regions. Integral field spectroscopy (IFS) provide an ideal means to achieve these goals providing simultaneous spatial and spectral resolution. Here we present the characterization of the work sample, composed by 671 outer regions and 725 inner regions from 263 isolated spirals galaxies observed by the CALIFA survey. The wide number of regions in both samples allows us to obtain statistically relevant results about the influence of metallicity, density and environment on star formation, and how it disseminates over the galaxy, to obtain evolutionary stories for the star-forming regions and to compare our results with models of massive star formation and galactic chemical evolution.

The mid-infrared provides a unique view of galaxy stellar populations, sensitive to both the integrated light of old, low-mass stars and to individual dusty mass-losing stars. We present results from an extended Spitzer/IRAC survey of M31 with total lengths of 6.6 and 4.4 degrees along the major and minor axes, respectively. The integrated surface brightness profile proves to be surprisingly difficult to trace in the outskirts of the galaxy, but we can also investigate the disk/halo transition via a star count profile, with careful correction for foreground and background contamination. Our point-source catalog allows us to report on mid-infrared properties of individual objects in the outskirts of M31, via cross-correlation with PAndAS, WISE, and other catalogs.

As part of the Z-PAndAS Keck II DEIMOS survey of resolved stars in our neighboring galaxy, Andromeda (M31), we have built up a unique data set of measured velocities and chemistries for thousands of stars in the Andromeda stellar halo, particularly probing its rich and complex substructure. In this contribution, we will discuss the structural, dynamical and chemical properties of Andromeda's dwarf spheroidal galaxies, and how there is no observational evidence for a difference in the evolutionary histories of those found on and off M31's vast plane of satellites. We will also discuss a possible extension to the most significant merger event in M31 - the Giant Southern Stream - and how we can use this feature to refine our understanding of M31's mass profile, and its complex evolution.

Initial efforts to identify extended UV disk (XUV-disk) galaxies were confined to nearby targets using image products from early in the GALEX mission. We developed a beta Zooniverse-based citizen science project to address this issue, specifically (1) allowing a dramatically larger galaxy sample by crowd-sourcing blink comparison UV-optical image inspection to volunteers, and (2) incorporating all archived GALEX data for each target considered. We aim to widely deploy this project to the public within the upcoming year.

We have discovered that warm gas flows along galaxy major and minor axes detected out to 200 kpc. Our results are derived from a sample of HST-imaged isolated galaxies with nearby background quasars used to probe their 105K CGM detected in HST/COS UV spectra (traced by Ovi absorption). We constrain the geometry of the gas to reside between 20-40 degrees of the projected major axis and within 60 degrees of the projected minor axis, with little-to-no gas found in between. Furthermore, strong absorption systems tend to be found along the minor axes of star-forming galaxies. All of our results are consistent with the current view of the CGM originating from major axis-fed inflows/recycled gas and from minor axis-driven outflows.

We present 3 representative cases from a sample of 16 local Brightest Cluster Galaxies observed using integral field spectroscopy. The observations extend to nearby neighbours and into the Intracluster Light (ICL). Population synthesis modeling shows that the ICL is younger and more metal poor compared to the BCG core and outskirts. This is consistent with a scenario in which the ICL grows by cluster processes, and alongside the growth of the BCG.

The decomposition of the 21 cm rotation curve of galaxies into contribution from the disk and dark halo depends on the adopted mass to light ratio (M/L) of the disk. Given the vertical velocity dispersion (σz ) of stars in the disk and its scale height (h), the disk surface density and hence the M/L can be estimated. Earlier works have used this technique to conclude that galaxy disks are submaximal. Here we address an important conceptual problem: σz and h must pertain to the same population. Our analysis concludes that previous studies underestimate the disk surface mass density by ~ 2, sufficient to make a maximal disk for M74 appear like a submaximal disk.

In order to understand the origin of the decreased star formation rate (SFR) efficiency of neutral atomic hydrogen gas measured in Damped Lyα Systems (DLAs) at z ~ 3, we measure the SFR efficiency of atomic gas at z ~ 1, z ~ 2, and z ~ 3 around star-forming galaxies. We create galaxy stacks in these three redshift bins, and measure the SFR efficiency by combining DLA absorber statistics with the observed rest-frame UV emission in the galaxies’ outskirts. We find that the SFR efficiency of Hi gas is ~ 3% of that predicted by the KS relation. We find no significant evolution in the SFR efficiency with redshift, although simulations and models predict a decreasing SFR efficiency with decreasing metallicity and thus with increasing redshift. We discuss possible explanations for this decreased efficiency without an evolution with redshift.

Results are presented from a deep imaging survey with the Spitzer Space Telescope which was designed to identify and measure the faint stellar populations around nearby galaxies. The Extended Disk Galaxy Exploration Science (EDGES) Survey includes a sample of 92 nearby galaxies with a range of morphological types and environments. The observations include a field-of-view of at least 5 times the optical size and are deep enough to detect stellar mass surface densities of several hundredths of a solar mass per square parsec. The observations reveal extended stellar features, such as stellar disks and stellar streams, around many of the target galaxies, as expected from hierarchical galaxy formation scenarios.

Deep observations of galaxy outskirts reveal faint extended stellar components (ESCs) of streams, shells, and halos, which are ghostly remnants of the tidal disruption of satellite galaxies. We use cosmological galaxy formation simulations in Cold Dark Matter (CDM) and Warm Dark Matter (WDM) models to explore how the dark matter model influences the spatial, kinematic, and orbital properties of ESCs. These reveal that the spherically averaged stellar mass density at large galacto-centric radius can be depressed by up to a factor of ~10 in WDM models relative to the CDM model, reflecting the anticipated suppressed abundance of satellite galaxies in WDM models. However, these differences are much smaller in WDM models that are compatible with observational limits, and are comparable in size to the system-to-system variation we find within the CDM model. This suggests that it will be challenging to place limits on dark matter using only the unresolved ESC.

We examine the role that stochastic fluctuations in the IMF and in the number of interacting binaries have on the spectro-photometric properties of sparse stellar populations as a function of age and metallicity.