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Triple supermassive black holes (SMBH) can form during the hierarchical mergers of massive galaxies with an existing binary. Perturbations by a third black hole may accelerate the merging process of an inner binary, for example through the Kozai mechanism. We analyze the evolution of simulated hierarchical triple SMBHs in galactic centers, and find resonances in the evolution of the semi-major axis, the eccentricity and the inclination, for both the inner and the outer orbits of the triple system, which are not only Kozai like. Through resonant oscillations, SMBH can trigger a significant increase of the inner SMBH binary eccentricity shortening the merger timescale expected from gravitational wave (GW) emission. As hierarchical triple SMBHs may be frequent in massive galaxies, the influence of orbital resonances is of great importance to our understanding of black hole coalescence and gravitational wave detection. Although Kozai mechanism is believed to play an important role in this process, detailed studies on the pattern of these resonances is necessary. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

We investigate the origin of stellar metallicity gradients in massive galaxies at large radii (r > 2 Reff) using ten cosmological zoom simulations of halos with 6 × 1012M⊙ < Mhalo < 2 × 1013M⊙. The simulations follow metal cooling and enrichment from SNII, SNIa and AGB winds. We explore the differential impact of an empirical model for galactic winds that reproduces the evolution of the mass-metallicity relation. At larger radii, the galaxies become more dominated by stars accreted from satellite galaxies in major and minor mergers. In the wind model, fewer stars are accreted, but they are significantly more metal poor resulting in steep global metallicity (〈 ▽ Zstars 〉= -0.35 dex/dex) gradients in agreement with observations. Metallicity gradients of models without winds are inconsistent with observations. For the wind model, stellar accretion is steepening existing in-situ metallicity gradients by about 0.2 dex by the present day and is required to match observed gradients. Metallicity gradients are significantly steeper for systems, which have accreted stars in minor mergers. In contrast, galaxies with major mergers have relatively flat gradients, confirming previous results. We highlight the importance of stellar accretion for stellar population properties of massive galaxies at large radii, which provide important constraints for formation models. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

We use a large sample of cosmological re-simulations of individual massive galaxies to investigate the origin of the strong increase in sizes and weak decrease of the stellar velocity dispersions since z = 2. At the end of a rapid early phase of star-formation, where stars are created from infalling cold gas, our simulated galaxies are all compact with projected half-mass radii of ≲ 1 kpc and central line-of-sight velocity dispersions of ≈ 262 km s−1. At lower redshifts (z < 2) those galaxies grow predominantly by the accretion of smaller stellar systems and evolve towards the observed local mass-size and mass-velocity dispersion relations. This loss of compactness is accompanied with an increase of central dark matter fractions. We find that the structural evolution of massive galaxies can be explained by frequent minor stellar mergers, which is the dominant mode of accretion for our simulated galaxies. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

We present an exploration of the integrated stellar populations of early-type galaxies (ETGs) from the ATLAS3D survey. We use two approaches: firstly the application of line-indices interpreted through single stellar population (SSP) models, which provide a single value of age, metallicity and abundance ratio. And secondly, by fitting a linear combination of SSP spectra to our data, smoothly weighted in the free parameters of age and metallicity, thereby inferring a star-formation history of these galaxies. Despite the significant differences in these approaches, we obtain generally consistent results, such that galaxies that are more massive appear older with enhanced abundance ratios using line indices, and have shorter star-formation histories weighted to early times. We highlight two limitations of the index-SSP approach. Firstly the SSP-equivalent ages belie the fact that ETGs are overwhelmingly composed of ancient stars. Secondly, the young stellar contributions implied in our star formation histories are required to obtain realistic UV-optical colours. We remark that, even fitting solar-abundance models, we can recover a star-formation duration that correlates with the measured alpha-enhancement, in agreement with other recent work. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The evolution and amplification of large-scale magnetic fields in galaxies is investigated by means of high resolution simulations of interacting galaxies. The goal of our project is to consider in detail the role of gravitational interaction of galaxies for the fate of magnetic fields. Since the tidal interaction up to galaxy merging is a basic ingredient of cold-dark matter (CDM) structure formation models we think that our simulations will give important clues for the interplay of galactic dynamics and magnetic fields. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Galactic spheroids can form as a result of galaxy interactions and mergers of disks. Detailed analyses of the photometric properties, the intrinsic orbital structure, the line-of-sight velocity distributions and the kinemetry of simulated merger remnants, which depend critically on the geometry and the gas content of the interacting progenitors, indicate that low and intermediate mass rotating ellipticals can form from mergers of disks. The masses and metallicities of all massive ellipticals and the kinematics of some massive non-rotating ellipticals cannot be explained by binary mergers. Thus these galaxies might have formed in a different way. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Previous research on globular clusters (GCs) dynamics is mostly based on semi-analytic, Fokker-Planck, Monte-Carlo methods and on direct N-body (NB) simulations. These works have great advantages but also limits since GCs are massive and compact and close encounters and binaries play very important roles in their dynamics. The former three methods make approximations and assumptions, while expensive computing time and number of stars limit the latter method. The current largest direct NB simulation has ~ 500k stars (Heggie 2014). Here, we accelerate the direct NB code NBODY6++ (which extends NBODY6 to supercomputers by using MPI) with new parallel computing technologies (GPU, OpenMP + SSE/AVX). Our aim is to handle large N (up to 106) direct NB simulations to obtain better understanding of the dynamical evolution of GCs. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Observational results from strong lensing and dynamical modeling indicate that the total density profiles of early-type galaxies are close to isothermal, i.e. ρtot ∝ rγ with γ ≈ −2. To understand the origin of this universal slope we study a set of simulated spheroids formed in cosmological hydrodynamical zoom-in simulations (see Oser et al. 2010 for more details). We find that the total stellar plus dark matter density profiles of all our simulations on average can be described by a power law with a slope of γ ≈ −2.1, with a tendency towards steeper slopes for more compact, lower mass ellipticals, while the total intrinsic velocity dispersion is flat for all simulations, independent of the values of γ. Our results are in good agreement with observations of Coma cluster ellipticals (Thomas et al. 2007) and results from strong lensing (Sonnenfeld et al. 2012). We find that for z ≳ 2 the majority of the stellar build-up occurs through in-situ star formation, i.e. the gas falls to the center of the galaxy and forms stars, causing the galaxy to be more compact and thus the stellar component to be more dominant. As a result, the total density slopes at z ≈ 2 are generally steeper (around γ ≈ −3). Between z = 2 and z = 0 galaxies grow mostly through dry merging, with each merging event shifting the slope more towards γ ≈ −2. We conclude from our simulations that the steepness of the slope of present day galaxies is a signature of the importance of mostly dry mergers in the formation of an elliptical, and suggest that all elliptical galaxies will with time end up in a configuration with a density slope of γ ≈ −2. For a more detailed analysis with a larger sample of simulations see Remus et al. (2013). [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

We present binary galaxy merger simulations of gas-rich disks (Sp-Sp), of early-type galaxies and disks (E-Sp, mixed mergers), and mergers of early-type galaxies (E-E, dry mergers) including radiative cooling, star formation, black hole (BH) accretion, and the associated feedback processes. The numerical simulations include cooling, star formation, supernova feedback, and BH accretion modeled following a Bondi–Hoyle accretion parameterization. The maximum accretion rate is limited to the Eddington rate, with a total of 0.5% of the accreted rest-mass energy distributed as thermal energy to the surrounding gas. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) simulations are a powerful tool to investigate hydrodynamical processes in astrophysics such as the formation of galactic disks. Dense gas clouds raining on the forming disk are possibly disrupted by Kelvin-Helmholtz-Instabilities (KHI). To understand the evolution of the halo clouds, we have to ascertain the capability of SPH to treat the KHI correctly, since SPH-methods tend to suffer from an innate surface tension and viscosity effects, both of which could dampen the KHI. We analytically derive a growth rate of the KHI including surface tension and viscosity in the linear regime, and compare this growth rate to results of numerical simulations by an SPH method and a grid-based method. We find that SPH in some cases suppresses the KHI (Junk et al., in prep). [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]