RT info:eu-repo/semantics/doctoralThesis
T1 Growth of massive galaxies through cosmic time
T2 El crecimiento de las galaxias masivas con el tiempo cosmológico
A1 Peralta de Arriba, Luis
K1 Galaxias
K1 Astrofísica
K1 Tiempo cosmológico
AB The discovery that massive galaxies are on average more compact in the primitive Universe has shown the importance of the mechanisms which are growing galaxies in size with cosmic time. A better understanding of the characteristics of these compact objects will give us clues about the nature of the mechanism which is contributing to the growth of massive galaxies.In the first part of this thesis we investigated the discrepancy between dynamical and stellar masses in massive compact early-type galaxies. Our findings indicate that this discrepancy scales with galaxy compactness, but it does not correlate with redshift. These results lead us to interpret the discrepancy between these two mass estimators as a violation of the homology hypothesis assumed in the computation of dynamical masses. The next step of our research was to guess what constraints on the evolutionary mechanisms of massive galaxies are implied by this non-homology. We find that galaxies populate a plane in the stellar mass-effective radius-velocity dispersion space, and we analyse the constraints that it means on a generic mechanism. Furthermore, we check that these constraints are compatible with simulations of the growth of early-type massive galaxies due to mergers.Finally we addressed the question of which is the best environment for looking for relic galaxies, i.e. old galaxies which have not suffered the size evolution. We find that they prefer dense environments. Comparing our observational results with simulations, we obtain an agreement between both.The global conclusion of this thesis is that all our results are compatible with the growth of massive galaxies through the accretion of galaxy satellites.
YR 2016
FD 2016
LK http://riull.ull.es/xmlui/handle/915/5461
UL http://riull.ull.es/xmlui/handle/915/5461
LA en
NO Doctorado en Astrofísica
NO Programa RD1393/2007
DS Repositorio institucional de la Universidad de La Laguna
RD 01-may-2024