Modelling the formation of today's massive ellipticals

Abstract

The discovery of a population of massive, compact and quiescent early-type galaxies has changed the view on plausible formation scenarios for the present day population of elliptical galaxies. Traditionally assumed formation histories dominated by 'single events' like early collapse or major mergers appear to be incomplete and have to be embedded in the context of hierarchical cosmological models with continuous gas accretion and the merging of small stellar systems (minor mergers). Once these processes are consistently taken into account the hierarchical models favor a two-phase assembly process and are in much better shape to capture the observed trends. We review some aspects of recent progress in the field.

To appear in the Proceedings of IAU Symposium No. 295: "The intriguing life of massive galaxies", D. Thomas, A. Pasquali and I. Ferreras, eds

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Cited by in corpus (9)

• The stellar population and initial mass function of NGC 1399 with MUSE
• The influence of Massive Black Hole Binaries on the Morphology of Merger Remnants
• Rapid Filamentary Accretion as the Origin of Extended Thin Discs
• SDSS-IV MaNGA: Stellar M/L gradients and the M/L-colour relation in galaxies
• The assembly of spheroid-dominated galaxies in the EAGLE simulation
• The mass-size plane of EAGLE galaxies
• The role of AGN on the structure, kinematics and evolution of ETGs in the Horizon simulations
• Field spheroid-dominated galaxies in a Λ-CDM Universe
• Use of spatial cross correlation function to study formation mechanism of massive elliptical galaxies