Using the eagle cosmological simulation of galaxy formation we test the ability of the ΛCDM cosmological model to reproduce the Tully-Fisher relation (TFR) and its redshift evolution. We find that our simulated galaxies follow a TFR that is in good agreement with observed results up to z = 1, indicating no evolution in the slope and a weak decrease in the zero-point.

Malin 1 is the best example among giant low surface brightness galaxies. New observations of this object in 6 broad-bands allow us for the first time to perform a pan-chromatic study of the stellar population in its 200 kpc wide disk. We observe a spiral structure revealing a star forming disk. The colors indicate a long history with a low efficiency of star formation. It is well reproduced by a model of disk galaxy making it similar to the disk of the Milky Way or other nearby spirals, except for its extremely large angular momentum.

The AMIGA project carries out a multiwavelength study of the largest catalogue of isolated galaxies from the Local Universe (CIG, Karachentseva 1973). Compared to any other sample —field galaxies included— and using highly strict isolation criteria (unperturbed for at least ~3 Gyr, Verdes-Montenegro et al. 2005), all the results show that these galaxies have the lowest values of the physical magnitudes expected to be enhanced by interactions. This strongly supports isolated galaxies as ideal laboratories for the study of galaxy formation and evolution. Despite CIG galaxies show the lowest HI integrated profile asymmetry level when compared to any other sample, some cases present up to 50% HI asymmetry (Espada et al. 2011b). We aim to shed light over the causes and sources of such asymmetries with our deep radiointerferometric and optical observations of CIG targets. Since major mergers are ruled out by the isolation criteria, in this work we are addressing whether minor mergers, internal processes or primordial gas accretion are responsible for such asymmetries.

Making use of a fiducial set of simulated disc galaxies spanning a wide range of mass, we examine the influence of stellar mass in the radial metallicity gradients and compare to observational trends from Ho et al. (2015).

Massive (Mstellar ⩾ 5×1010 M⊙) Early-Type Galaxies (ETGs) must build an outer stellar envelope over cosmic time in order to account for their remarkable size evolution. This is similar to what occurs to nearby Late-Type Galaxies (LTGs), which create their stellar haloes out of the debris of lower mass systems. We analysed the outer parts of massive ETGs at z < 1 by exploiting the Hubble Ultra Deep Field imaging. These galaxies store 10-30% of their stellar mass at distances 10 < R/kpc < 50, in contrast to the low percentages (< 5%) found for LTGs. We find evidence for a progressive outskirt development with redshift driven solely via merging.

Interstellar dust is still a dominant uncertainty in Astronomy, limiting precision in e.g., cosmological distance estimates and models of how light is re-processed within a galaxy. When a foreground galaxy serendipitously overlaps a more distant one, the latter backlights the dusty structures in the nearer foreground galaxy.

Such an overlapping or occulting galaxy pair can be used to measure the distribution of dust in the closest galaxy with great accuracy. The STARSMOG program uses Hubble to map the distribution of dust in foreground galaxies in fine (<100 pc) detail. Integral Field Unit (IFU) observations will map the effective extinction curve, disentangling the role of fine-scale geometry and grain composition on the path of light through a galaxy.

The overlapping galaxy technique promises to deliver a clear understanding of the dust in galaxies: geometry, a probability function of dimming as a function of galaxy mass and radius, and its dependence on wavelength.

We studied the morphology of two brightest members of the nearby NGC 697 group of galaxies, and found evidence of satellite accretion onto the primary galaxy NGC 697 of the group as well as outer and inner irregularities of the only early-type galaxy NGC 680 of the group, which are probably shaped by recent dry merging event(s).

Smith’s Cloud is a large few × 106 Solar Mass cloud which will impact the Milk Way disk in about 35 Million Years (Lockman et al., 2008). Green Bank Telescope OH observations indicate that there are no molecules present in Smith’s Cloud, and thus there is no active ongoing chemistry in Smith’s Cloud.

It is well known that the interaction between two disk galaxies generates tidal spiral arms and a connection in the form of a bridge. Here we address the question of the formation of tidal arms and bridges from a dynamical point of view. We model the bridges and tails observed in interacting galaxies using the invariant manifolds associated to the Lyapunov orbits of the Lagrangian points of the galactic system, when the two galaxies are considered as two point masses in a circular orbit.

Much progress has been made in recent years towards understanding how early-type galaxies (ETGs) form and evolve. SAURON (Bacon et al. 2001) integral-field spectroscopy from the ATLAS3D survey (Cappellari et al. 2011) has suggested that less massive ETGs are linked directly to spirals, whereas the most massive objects appear to form from a series of merging and accretion events (Cappellari et al. 2013). However, the ATLAS3D data typically only extends to about one half-light radius (or effective radius, Re ), making it unclear if this picture is truly complete.

We show how present-day 10 meter class telescopes can provide broadband imaging 1.5-2 mag deeper than most previous results within a reasonable amount of time ( ~ 8h on source integration). We illustrate the ability of the 10.4 m Gran Telescopio de Canarias (GTC) telescope to produce imaging with a limiting surface brightness of 31.5 mag/arcsec2 (3σ in 10 × 10 arcsec boxes). We explore the stellar halos of nearby galaxies obtaining surface brightness radial profiles down to μr ~ 33 mag/arcsec2. This depth is similar to that obtained using star counts techniques of Local Group galaxies, but is achieved at a distance where this technique is unfeasible.

Our view of galaxies has been transformed in recent years with diffuse halo gas surrounding galaxies that contains at least as many metals and baryons as their disks. While single sight lines through galaxy halos seen in absorption have provided key new constraints, they provide only average properties. Our massive neighbor, the Andromeda (M31) galaxy, provides an unique way to study its circumgalactic medium whereby we can study it using not one or two, but ~36 sightlines thanks to its proximity. With our Large HST program — Project AMIGA (Absorption Maps In the Gas of Andromeda), our goals are to determine the spatial distribution of the halo properties of a L* galaxy using 36 background targets at different radii and azimuths. In this brief paper, I discuss briefly the scientific rationale of Project AMIGA and some early science results. In particular, for the first time we have demonstrated that M31 has a gaseous halo that extends to R vir with as much as metal and baryonic masses than in its disk and has substantial change in its ionization properties with more highly ionized gas found at R ~ R vir than cooler gas found near the disk.

We propose a qualitative explanation for the light radial profile of a spiral galaxy based on the quantitative magnetic model of truncations (Battaner et al. 2002) in which when stars are born (hence the magnetic force acting on the progenitor gas cloud is no longer at work) migrate to larger orbits or escape.

Two-armed grand-design spirals may form if the shape of its dark matter halo changes abruptly enough. The feasibility of such a mechanism is tested in realistic simulations. The interplay of such externally-driven spirals and self-induced transient spirals is then studied. Subhaloes are also found to lead to transient grand-design spiral structures when they impact the disk.

Outskirts of spiral galaxies, including our own, and dwarf irregular galaxies are known to have a different environment from the solar neighborhood, e.g., low metallicities ( ~ − 1 dex). Among them, the outer Galaxy is the closest and hence is so far the only site suitable for population studies of resolved stars on the same basis as solar neighborhood. We have obtained NIR images of young clusters in the outer Galaxy, using the Subaru 8.2-m telescope, and clearly resolved cluster members with mass detection limits of ~ 0.1 M ⊙. Based on the fitting of K-band luminosity functions (KLFs) for four clusters, we found that the initial mass function (IMF) in the outer Galaxy is consistent with that in the solar neighborhood in terms of the high-mass slope and IMF peak. Upcoming observations with a higher spatial resolution and sensitivity, using JWST, TMT, etc., will allow us to extend spatially-resolved studies of the IMF to Local Group galaxies.

Models of galaxy formation in a hierarchical universe predict substantial scatter in the halo-to-halo stellar properties, owing to stochasticity in galaxies’ merger histories. Currently, only few detailed observations of galaxy’s halos are available, mainly for the Milky Way and M31. The Galaxy Halos, Outer disks, Substructure, Thick disks and Star clusters (GHOSTS) HST survey is the largest study to date of the resolved stellar populations in the outskirts of disk galaxies and its observations offer a direct test of model predictions. Here we present the results we obtain for six highly inclined nearby Milky Way-mass spiral galaxies. We find a great diversity in the properties of their stellar halos.

The outskirts of galaxies — especially the very extended Hi disks of galaxies — are strongly affected by their local environment. I highlight the giant 2X-Hi disks of nearby galaxies (M 83, NGC 3621, and NGC 1512), studied as part of the Local Volume Hi Survey (LVHIS), their kinematics and relation to XUV disks, signatures of tidal interactions and accretion events, the M HI - D HI relation as well as the formation of tidal dwarf galaxies. - Using multi-wavelength data, I create 3D visualisations of the gas and stars in galaxies, with the shape of their warped disks obtained through kinematic modelling of their Hi velocity fields.

Lenticular galaxies (S0s) are more likely to host anti-truncated (Type III) stellar discs than galaxies of later Hubble types. Previous work on Type-III S0s at z = 0 revealed that the characteristic parameters of the breaks obey tight scaling relations (Borlaff et al. 2014). These relation are similar in both S0’s and spirals, in optical and NIR, and for barred and non-barred galaxies (Eliche-Moral et al. 2015). We have analysed 3DHST images (Brammer et al. 2012) of S0 galaxies from the SHARDS survey (Pérez-González et al. 2013) in order to investigate if E/S0 and S0 galaxies with anti-truncated stellar profiles up to z ~ 0.6 follow similar scaling relations compared to the local sample. We find that the characteristic photometric parameters of Type-III S0s at 0.4 < z < 0.6 obey analogous scaling relations to those observed in their local counterparts, lying on top of the extrapolations of the local trends towards brighter magnitudes in several photometric diagrams and sharing similar trends and values in the h i – R brkIII, h o – R brkIII and h i – h o diagrams. We have measured the offsets in magnitudes between two subsets of the z ~ 0.5 and z = 0 samples with similar masses (log 10M/M ⊙ ~ 10.7). The median offsets are: ΔμbrkIII = − 2.23+0.46 −0.62, Δμ0, i = − 2.61+0.31 −0.26 and Δμ0, o = − 2.31+0.57 −0.78 mag arcsec-2. We find that PSF corrections in our images do not significantly affect the scaling relations obtained in our 0.2 < z < 0.6 sample. In conclusion, the existence of similar scaling relations in Type-III S0 discs since z ~ 0.6 implies that the structures of the inner and outer discs in anti-truncated S0s have been similarly linked in the last ~ 6 Gyr, posing strong constraints to the processes proposed to explain their formation.

CALIFA data show that isolated disk galaxies present a common gas-phase metallicity gradient, with a characteristic slope of -0.1dex/re between 0.3 and 2 disk effective radius re (Sanchez et al. 2014). Here we construct a simple model to investigate which processes regulate the formation and evolution.

We present the first submillimetric line survey of extragalactic sources carried out by APEX. The surveys cover the 0.8 mm atmospheric window from 270 to 370GHz toward NGC253, NGC4945 and Arp220. We found in NGC 253, 150 transitions of 26 molecules. For NGC 4945, 136 transitions of 24 molecules, and 64 transitions of 17 molecules for Arp 220. Column densities and rotation temperatures have been determinate using the Local Thermodinamical Equilibrium(LTE) line profile simulation and fitting in the MADCUBA IJ software. The differences found in ratios between the Galactic Center and the starburst galaxies NGC 4945 and NGC 253 suggest that the gas is less processed in the latter than in the Galactic Center. The high 18O/17O ratios in the galaxies NGC 4945 and NGC 253 suggest also material less processed in the nuclei of these galaxies than in the Galactic Center. This is consistent with the claim that 17O is a more representative primary product than 18O in stellar nucleosynthesis (Wilson and Rood 1994); Also, we did a Multitransitions study of H3O+ at 307GHz, 364GHz, 388GHz and 396GHz. From our non-LTE analysis of H3O+ in NGC253 with RADEX we found that the collisional excitation can not explain the observed intensity of the ortho 396 GHz line. Excitation by radiation from the dust in the Far-IR can roughly explain the observations if the H2 densities are relatively low. From the derived H3O+ column densities we conclude that the chemistry of this molecule is dominated by ionization produce by the starburst in NGC253 (UV radiation from the O stars) and Arp 220 (cosmic rays from the supernovae) and likely from the AGN in NGC4549 (X-rays ); Finally, we report, for the first time, the tentative detection of the molecular ion HCNH+ (precursor of HCN and HNC) toward a galaxy, NGC4945, abundance explain the claimed enhancement of HCN abundance in the AGN, due to the enhancement of the ionization rate by X-rays. The abundance is much larger than the Galactic center of the Milky Way.