• The Bulletin of The Korean Astronomical Society
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• v.38 no.2
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• pp.73.2-73.2
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• 2013

In the current ${\Lambda}CDM$ hierarchical merging paradigm, a galaxy like the Milky Way formed by numerous mergers of ancient subsystems. Most of the relics of these building blocks, however, are yet to be discovered or identified. Recent progress in the Milky Way globular cluster research is throwing new light on this perspective. The discoveries of multiple stellar populations having different heavy element abundances in some massive globular clusters are suggesting that they are most likely the remaining cores or relics of disrupted dwarf galaxies. In this talk, we will report our progress in the (1) narrow-band photometry, (2) low-resolution spectroscopy, and (3) population modeling for this growing group of peculiar globular clusters.

• The Bulletin of The Korean Astronomical Society
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• v.35 no.2
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• pp.82.2-82.2
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• 2010

We investigate the distribution of stars along the red giant branch (RGB) in the globular clusters (GCs) NGC 288 and NGC 362 from Caby photometry using the CTIO 4m Blanco telescope. Our color-magnitude diagrams in hk index show that the RGB stars have two distinct subpopulations with different Ca abundances apparently supplied by the Type II supernovae explosions. However, the RGB splits are not shown in the b - y color, as indicated by previous observations. Our stellar population models show that the presence of two distinct RGBs in these GCs can be reproduced if metal-rich second generation stars are also enhanced in helium and younger by 1 ~ 2 Gyrs.

• Journal of The Korean Astronomical Society
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• v.54 no.2
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• pp.71-88
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• 2021

We use N-body/hydrodynamic simulations to study the evolution of the spin of a Milky Way-like galaxy through interactions. We perform a controlled experiment of co-planar galaxy-galaxy encounters and study the evolution of disk spins of interacting galaxies. Specifically, we consider cases where the late-type target galaxy encounters an equally massive companion galaxy, which has either a late or an early-type morphology, with a closest approach distance of about 50 kpc, in prograde or retrograde sense. By examining the time change of the circular velocity of the disk material of the target galaxy from each case, we find that the target galaxy tends to lose the spin through prograde collisions but hardly through retrograde collisions, regardless of the companion galaxy type. The decrease of the spin results mainly from the deflection of the orbit of the disk material by tidal disruption. Although there is some disk material which gains the circular velocity through hydrodynamic as well as gravitational interactions or by transferring material from the companion galaxy, it turns out that the amount of the material is generally insufficient to increase the overall galactic spin under the conditions we set. We find that the spin angular momentum of the target galaxy disk decreases by 15-20% after a prograde collision. We conclude that the accumulated effects of galaxy-galaxy interactions will play an important role in determining the total angular momentum of late-type galaxies.

• The Bulletin of The Korean Astronomical Society
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• v.39 no.1
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• pp.36.1-36.1
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• 2014

The correlation between mass of Type Ia Supernova (SN Ia) host galaxies and Hubble residual is now well-established. The origin of this relation, however, is yet to be understood. We have used low-resolution spectra of early-type hosts from YONSEI (YOnsei Nearby Supernovae Evolution Investigation) project to measure central velocity dispersion and Lick/IDS absorption indices. By using the Evolutionary Population Synthesis (EPS) models, luminosity-weighted mean age and metallicity of host galaxies were determined from $H{\beta}$ and absorption lines. Here we will discuss the correlation between the velocity dispersion, which indicates the mass of galaxies, and mean age of stellar population in our sample of early-type host galaxies.

• The Bulletin of The Korean Astronomical Society
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• v.38 no.2
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• pp.51.2-51.2
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• 2013

Galactic fly-by interactions are believed to be far more frequent than direct mergers, acting as hidden drivers of galaxy evolution. We perform a tree-particle-mesh code GOTPM, and investigate the statistical properties of the fly-by interactions as functions of halo masses and ambient environments. Based on the total energy of the two halos of interest, impulsive fly-by pairs are identified from eventual merger candidates. We find three obvious results as follows: (1) Halos in the high-dense environment experience more frequent mergers and fly-by encounters than those in the low-dense region; (2) In the massive halos, both merger and fly-by fractions evolve more dramatically with time than those in dwarfs; and (3) The fly-by fraction decreases as approaching the present epoch, in contrast to the increase of the merger fraction.

• The Bulletin of The Korean Astronomical Society
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• v.42 no.2
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• pp.46.1-46.1
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• 2017

Late-type galaxies falling into a cluster would evolve being influenced by the interactions with both the cluster and the nearby cluster member galaxies. Most numerical studies, however, tend to focus on the effects of the former with little work done on those of the later. We thus perform numerical study on the evolution of a late-type galaxy falling radially toward the cluster center interacting with neighbouring early-type galaxies, using N-body, hydrodynamical simulations. Based on the information about the typical galaxy encounters obtained by using the galaxy catalog of Coma cluster, we run the simulations for the cases where a Milky Way Galaxy-like late-type galaxy, flying either edge-on or face-on, experiences six consecutive collisions with twice more massive early-type galaxies having hot gas in their halos. Our simulations show that the evolution of the late-type galaxy can be significantly affected by the high-speed multiple collisions with the early-type galaxies, such as on the cold gas content and the star formation activity, particularly through the hydrodynamic interactions between the cold disk and the hot gas halos. By comparing our simulation results with those of others, we claim that the role of the galaxy-galaxy interactions on the evolution of late-type galaxies in clusters could be comparable with that of the galaxy-cluster interactions, depending on the dynamical history.

• The Bulletin of The Korean Astronomical Society
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• v.37 no.2
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• pp.233-233
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• 2012

I review the dependence of galaxy properties on environmental parameters such as the local density, nearest neighbor distance and morphology. We find that a galaxy with an early- or late-type nearest companion within its virial radius tends to be an early or late type, respectively. The morphology of galaxies located in high density regions tends to be the same as that of the ones in low density regions if their luminosity and the nearest neighbor environment are the same. This strongly supports that galaxy morphology and luminosity evolution have been driven mainly by galaxy-galaxy interactions, and the background density affected morphology and luminosity only through the frequency of interactions.

• The Bulletin of The Korean Astronomical Society
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• v.38 no.2
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• pp.59.1-59.1
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• 2013

Type Ia supernovae (SNe) are providing the most conclusive evidence for accelerating universe with dark energy in observational cosmology. In these investigations, look-back time evolution of SNe luminosity is regarded as negligible on the basic assumption. However, several recent works present some systematic differences among hosts which have different characteristics of stellar population. For more direct investigation, we are proceeding with our YONSEI (YOnsei Nearby Supernovae Evolution Investigation) project. Only early-type hosts in our catalogue were chosen in order to estimate the luminosity-weighted mean age and metallicity directly using Single Stellar Population (SSP) models and ignore the effect from the dust extinction. Observations using low-resolution spectrographs are still in progress at Las Campanas Observatory with 2.5m telescope and at McDonald Observatory with 2.7m telescope. We have thus far obtained spectra for 30 early-type hosts. After weak emission line correction, Lick/IDS absorption-line indices are measured and YEPS spectroscopic evolution model was applied to determine mean population ages and metallicities. Our preliminary results show that SNe Ia hosted in older galaxies seem to be brighter at 1.4 - 3 sigma levels, however, more observations and analyses are still needed to confirm this correlation.

• The Bulletin of The Korean Astronomical Society
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• v.46 no.1
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• pp.56.3-57
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• 2021

We use N-body/hydrodynamic simulations to study the evolution of the spin of a Milky Way-like galaxy through interactions. We perform a controlled experiment of co-planner galaxy-galaxy encounters and study the evolution of disk spins of interacting galaxies. Specifically, we consider the cases where the late-type target galaxy encounters an equally massive companion galaxy, which has either a late or an early-type morphology, with the closest approach distance of about 50 kpc, in prograde or retrograde sense. By examining the time change of the circular velocity of the disk material of the target galaxy from each case, we find that the target galaxy tends to lose the spin through prograde collisions but hardly through retrograde collisions, regardless of the companion galaxy type. The decrease of the spin results mainly from the deflection of the orbit of the disk material by tidal disruption. It is found that the spin angular momentum of the disk of the target galaxy decreases by 15 - 20% after a prograde collision. We conclude that the accumulated effects of galaxy-galaxy interactions will play an important role in determining the angular momentum of late-type galaxies at current stage.

• The Bulletin of The Korean Astronomical Society
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• v.41 no.2
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• pp.60.3-61
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• 2016

Galaxy morphology involves complex effects from both secular and non-secular evolution of galaxies. Although it is a final product of galaxy evolution, it gives a clue to the processes that the a galaxy has gone through. Galaxy clusters are the sites where the most massive galaxies are found, and thus the most dramatic merger histories are embedded. Our deep imaging program (${\mu}{\sim}28\;mag\;arcsec^{-2}$), KASI-Yonsei Deep Imaging Survey for Clusters (KYDISC), targets 14 Abell clusters at z = 0.016 - 0.14 using IMACS/Magellan telescope and MegaCam/CFHT to investigate cluster galaxies especially on low surface brightness features related to galaxy interactions. We visually classify galaxy morphology based on criteria related to secular or merger related evolution and find that the morphological mixture of galaxies varies considerably from cluster to cluster. Moreover it depends on the characteristics (e.g. cluster mass) of cluster itself which implies that environmental effects in cluster scale is also an important factor to the evolution of galaxies together with intrinsic (secular) and galaxy merger. Our deep imaging survey for morphological inspection of cluster galaxies with low surface brightness is expected to be a useful basis to understand the nature of cluster galaxies and their internal/external evolutionary path.