Recent results are reviewed on galaxy dynamics, bar evolution, destruction and re-formation, cold gas accretion, gas radial flows and AGN fueling, minor mergers. Some problems of galaxy evolution are discussed in particular, exchange of angular momentum, radial migration through resonant scattering, and consequences on abundance gradients, the frequency of bulgeless galaxies, and the relative role of secular evolution and hierarchical formation.
We present a theoretical model for the evolution of mass, angular momentum and size of galaxy disks and bulges, and we implement it into the semi-analytic galaxy formation code SAGE. The model follows both secular and violent evolutionary channels, including smooth accretion, disk instabilities, minor and major mergers. We find that the combination of our recipe with hierarchical clustering produces two distinct populations of bulges: merger-driven bulges, akin to classical bulges and ellipticals, and instability-driven bulges, akin to secular (or pseudo-)bulges. The model mostly reproduces th…
We are interested in investigating the growth of structures at the nonlinear scales of galaxy clusters from an observational perspective: we explore the possibility of measuring the mass accretion rate of galaxy clusters from their mass profile beyond the virial radius. We derive the accretion rate from the mass of a spherical shell whose infall velocity is extracted from $N$-body simulations. In the redshift range $z=[0,2]$, our prescription returns an average mass accretion rate within $20-40 \%$ of the average rate derived from the merger trees of dark matter haloes extracted from $N$-body …
Accretion shocks around galaxy clusters mark the position where the infalling diffuse gas is significantly slowed down, heated up, and becomes a part of the intracluster medium (ICM). They play an important role in setting the ICM properties. Hydrodynamical simulations have found an intriguing result that the radial position of this accretion shock tracks closely the position of the `splashback radius' of the dark matter, despite the very different physical processes that gas and dark matter experience. Using the self-similar spherical collapse model for dark matter and gas, we find that an al…
Galaxy cluster number count has been proven to be a powerful cosmological probe. However, cosmological constraints established with galaxy cluster number count are highly dependent on the calibration of the mass-observable relations. Thanks to its nearly mass independence the specific mass accretion rate of galaxy clusters is nearly insensitive to the calibration of mass-observable relations. The study of galaxy cluster number count evolution allows to probe the galaxy cluster mass accretion history in the context of an homogenous Universe. In this paper, we use relative abundance matching to …
Feedback from energy liberated by gas accretion onto black holes (BHs) is an attractive mechanism to explain the exponential cut-off at the massive end of the galaxy stellar mass function (SMF). Semi-analytic models of galaxy formation in which this form of feedback is assumed to suppress cooling in haloes where the gas cooling time is large compared to the dynamical time do indeed achieve a good match to the observed SMF. Furthermore, hydrodynamic simulations of individual halos in which gas is assumed to accrete onto the central BH at the Bondi rate have shown that a self-regulating regime i…
Galaxy clusters exhibit remarkable self-similar behavior which allows us to establish simple scaling relationships between observable quantities and cluster masses, making galaxy clusters useful cosmological probes. Recent X-ray observations suggest that self-similarity may be broken in the outskirts of galaxy clusters. In this work, we analyze a mass-limited sample of massive galaxy clusters from the Omega500 cosmological hydrodynamic simulation to investigate the self-similarity of the diffuse X-ray emitting intracluster medium (ICM) in the outskirts of galaxy clusters. We find that the self…
We explore the possibility of using the external regions of galaxy clusters to measure their mass accretion rate (MAR). The main goal is to provide a method to observationally investigate the growth of structures on the nonlinear scales of galaxy clusters. We derive the MAR by using the mass profile beyond the splashback radius, evaluating the mass of a spherical shell and the time it takes to fall in. The infall velocity of the shell is extracted from $N$-body simulations. The average MAR returned by our prescription in the redshift range $z=[0, 2]$ is within $20-40 \%$ of the average MAR der…
High-resolution simulations of supermassive black holes in isolated galaxies have suggested the importance of short (~10 Myr) episodes of rapid accretion caused by interactions between the black hole and massive dense clouds within the host. Accretion of such clouds could potentially provide the dominant source for black hole growth in high-z galaxies, but it remains unresolved in cosmological simulations. Using a stochastic subgrid model calibrated by high-resolution isolated galaxy simulations, we investigate the impact that variability in black hole accretion rates has on black hole growth …
We explore the possibility of measuring the mass accretion rate (MAR) of galaxy clusters from their mass profiles beyond the virial radius $R_{200}$. We derive the accretion rate from the mass of a spherical shell whose inner radius is $2R_{200}$, whose thickness changes with redshift, and whose infall velocity is assumed to be equal to the mean infall velocity of the spherical shells of dark matter halos extracted from $N$-body simulations. This approximation is rather crude in hierarchical clustering scenarios where both smooth accretion and aggregation of smaller dark matter halos contribut…
The galaxy stellar-to-halo mass relation (SHMR) is nearly time-independent for $z < 4$. We therefore construct a time-independent SHMR model for central galaxies, wherein the in-situ star formation rate (SFR) is determined by the halo mass accretion rate (MAR), which we call Stellar-Halo Accretion Rate Coevolution (SHARC). We show that the $\sim0.3$ dex dispersion of the halo MAR matches the observed dispersion of the SFR on the star-formation main sequence (MS). In the context of "bathtub"-type models of galaxy formation, SHARC leads to mass-dependent constraints on the relation between SFR a…
We describe a physical model of the outflows produced as a result of gas accretion onto a black hole, and the resultant changes to star formation rates and efficiencies in galaxies, using the Radio-SAGE semi-analytic galaxy formation model. We show that the ratio of outflow rate to SFR of galaxies is mainly driven by black hole mass and virial halo mass, and show that the SFR is higher than the outflow rate at low black hole masses. The model consistently reproduces the observed evolution of star formation rate density from z = 6 to z = 0, as well as the trend of the stellar mass - halo mass r…
