• The Bulletin of The Korean Astronomical Society
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• v.42 no.2
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• pp.37.1-37.1
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• 2017

Since the seminal work of Perrin, physicists have understood in the context of kinetic theory how ink slowly diffuses in a glass of water. The fluctuations of the stochastic forces acting on water molecules drive the diffusion of the ink in the fluid. This is the archetype of a process described by the so-called fluctuation-dissipation theorem, which universally relates the rate of diffusion to the power spectrum of the fluctuating forces. For stars in galaxies, a similar process occurs but with two significant differences, due to the long-range nature of the gravitational interaction: (i) for the diffusion to be effective, stars need to resonate, i.e. present commensurable frequencies, otherwise they only follow the orbit imposed by their mean field; (ii) the amplitudes of the induced fluctuating forces are significantly boosted by collective effects, i.e. by the fact that, because of self-gravity, each star generates a wake in its neighbours. In the expanding universe, an overdense perturbation passing a critical threshold will collapse onto itself and, through violent relaxation and mergers, rapidly converge towards a stationary, phase-mixed and highly symmetric state, with a partially frozen orbital structure. The object is then locked in a quasi-stationary state imposed by its mean gravitational field. Of particular interests are strongly responsive colder systems which, given time and kicks, find the opportunity to significantly reshuffle their orbital structure towards more likely configurations. This presentation aims to explain this long-term reshuffling called gravity-driven secular evolution on cosmic timescales, described by extended kinetic theory. I will illustrate this with radial migration, disc thickening and the stellar cluster in the galactic centre.

• The Bulletin of The Korean Astronomical Society
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• v.35 no.1
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• pp.72.1-72.1
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• 2010

Gas materials in the inner Galactic disk continuously migrate toward the Galactic center (GC) due to interactions with the bar potential, magnetic fields, stars, and other gaseous materials. In case of the Milky Way, those in forms of molecules appear to accumulate around 200 pc from the center (the central molecular zone, CMZ) to form stars there and further inside. The bar potential in the GC is thought to be responsible for such acculmulation of molecules and subsequent star formation, which is believed to have been continous throughout the lifetime of the Galaxy. We present 3-D hydrodynamic simulations of the CMZ that consider self-gravity, radiative cooling, and supernova feedback, and discuss the efficiency and role of the star formation in that region. We find that the gas accumulated in the CMZ by a bar potential of the inner bulge effectively turns into stars, supporting the idea that the stellar cusp inside the central 200 pc is a result of the sustained star formation in the CMZ. The obtained star formation rate in the CMZ, 0.03-0.1 Msun, is consistent with the recent estimate based on the mid-infrared observations by Yusef-Zadeh et al. We discuss the secular evolution of nuclear bulges in general, based on our results.

• The Bulletin of The Korean Astronomical Society
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• v.38 no.1
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• pp.33.1-33.1
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• 2013

Galaxies undergo various processes in the cluster environment, which could affect their evolution. In particular, ram pressure due to intracluster medium (ICM) can effectively remove HI gas, which is a relatively diffuse form of interstellar medium (ISM). On the other hand, molecular gas is not expected to get easily stripped as atomic gas since it is denser and sitting well within the stellar disk in a deeper potential well. However, cluster galaxies are found to be redder and more passive in star formation activity compared to their field counterpart. This implies that molecular gas may also get affected somehow in dense environments. In this work, we investigate molecular gas properties of a sample of galaxies undergoing HI stripping due to the ICM. We present the 12/13 CO (2-1) data of four spiral galaxies in the Virgo cluster at different ram pressure stripping stages, obtained using the Sub Millimeter Array (SMA). CO morphology of the sample appears to be highly asymmetric and disturbed. Using the ratio of different lines, we probe the molecular gas temperature in different regions. We find higher gas temperature than the range normally found among field galaxies. We discuss how these distinct molecular gas properties may affect star formation and hence the evolution of the cluster galaxy population.

• The Bulletin of The Korean Astronomical Society
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• v.41 no.1
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• pp.32.4-33
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• 2016

Recent studies suggest that the difference between global and local properties of galaxies (the local-global environmental (LoG) bias) might be important in the Type Ia supernova (SN Ia) host galaxy studies. Obtaining local spectroscopic properties of hosts at high redshift, however, is challenging. Here we will introduce a more efficient way to conduct this study by only using photometric data. We find that when we restrict a sample to the hosts whose stellar mass is less than $10^{10}$ $M_{\odot}$, a sample without LoG bias is efficiently selected. From the sample without LoG bias, we confirm that SNe Ia in locally star-forming environment are $0.103{\pm}0.010mag$ and $0.085{\pm}0.012mag$ fainter than those in locally passive region, for MLCS2k2 and SALT2, respectively. Because of ~6 times larger sample that covers much wider redshift range, our results are far more significant statistically, $10.3{\sigma}$ for MLCS2k2 and $7.1{\sigma}$ for SALT2, than previous results.

• The Bulletin of The Korean Astronomical Society
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• v.41 no.1
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• pp.70.2-70.2
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• 2016

Star formation in galaxies is one of the key factors in galaxy evolution. It is believed that star formation is triggered and enhanced by mergers among galaxies or secular evolution. However, how much these two mechanisms contribute on star formation is not well known yet. Recently, many other studies show observational evidences of faint merger features(tidal tails, stellar streams) around nearby galaxies with deep optical imaging. This study aims to investigate the fraction of star forming galaxies exhibiting faint features to total galaxies. We are analyzing samples of 76 star forming galaxies (NUV < -18) to find merger features from stacked B, R band frames taken at Maidanak 1.5m, McDonald 2.1m telescope and g, r frames from Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope (CFHT) MegaCam archival data. With the fraction, we can expect to know the contribution of mergers on star formation to galaxies.

• Publications of The Korean Astronomical Society
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• v.30 no.2
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• pp.349-353
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• 2015

We use multi-wavelength observations of galaxy groups to probe the formation models for galaxy formation in cosmological simulations, statistically. The observations include Chandra and XMM-Newton X-ray observations, optical photometry and radio observations at 1.4 GHz and 610 MHz. Using a large sample of galaxy groups observed by the XMM-Newton X-ray telescope as part of the XMM-Large Scale Survey, we carried out a statistical study of the redshift evolution of the luminosity gap for a well defined mass-selected group sample and show the relative success of some of the semi-analytic models in reproducing the observed properties of galaxy groups up to redshift z ~ 1.2. The observed trend argues in favour of a stronger evolution of the feedback from active galactic nuclei at z < 1 compared to the models. The slope of the relation between the magnitude of the brightest cluster galaxy and the value of the luminosity gap does not evolve with redshift and is well reproduced by the models. We find that the radio power of giant elliptic galaxies residing in galaxy groups with a large luminosity gap are lower compared to giant ellipticals of the same stellar masses but in typical galaxy groups.

• Publications of The Korean Astronomical Society
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• v.30 no.2
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• pp.261-263
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• 2015

The metallicity distribution of globular clusters (GCs) provides a crucial clue for the star formation history of their host galaxy. With the assumption that GCs are generally old, GC colors have been used as a proxy for GC metallicities. Bimodal color distributions of GCs observed in most large galaxies have, for decades, been interpreted as bimodal metallicity distributions, indicating the presence of two populations within a galaxy. However, the conventional view has been challenged by a new theory that non-linear GC color-metallicity relations can cause a bimodal color distribution even from a single-peaked metallicity distribution. Using photometric and spectroscopic data of NGC 5128 GCs in combination with stellar population simulation models, we examine the effect of non-linearity in GC color-metallicity relations on transformation of the color distributions into the metallicity distributions. Although in some colors offsets are present between observations and models for the color-metallicity relations, their overall shape agrees well for various colors. After the offsets are corrected, the observed spectroscopic metallicity distribution is well reproduced via modeled color-metallicity relations from various color distributions having different morphologies. We discuss the implications of our results.

• The Bulletin of The Korean Astronomical Society
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• v.44 no.2
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• pp.39.3-39.3
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• 2019

Ram pressure stripping due to the intracluster medium (ICM) is an important environmental process, which causes star formation quenching by effectively removing cold interstellar gas from galaxies in dense environments. The evidence of diffuse atomic gas stripping has been reported in several HI imaging studies. However, it is still under debate whether molecular gas (i.e., a more direct ingredient for star formation) can be also affected and/or stripped by ram pressure. The goal of this thesis is to understand the impact of ram pressure on the molecular gas content of cluster galaxies and hence star formation activity. To achieve this, we conducted a series of detailed studies on the molecular gas properties of three Virgo spiral galaxies with clear signs of active HI gas stripping (NGC 4330, NGC 4402, and NGC 4522) based on high-resolution CO data obtained from the Submillimeter Array (SMA) and Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA). As a result, we find the evidence that the molecular gas disk also gets affected by ram pressure in similar ways as HI even well inside of the stellar disk. In addition, we detected extraplanar 13CO clumps in one of the sample, which is the first case ever reported in ram pressure stripped galaxies. By analyzing multi-wavelength data (e.g., Hα, UV, HI, and CO), we discuss detailed processes of how ram pressure affects star formation activities and hence evolution of cluster galaxies. We also discuss the origin of extraplanar 13CO, and how ram pressure can potentially contribute to the chemical evolution of the ICM.

• Publications of The Korean Astronomical Society
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• v.32 no.1
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• pp.257-261
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• 2017

We built a $8{\mu}m$ selected sample of galaxies in the NEP-AKARI field by defining 4 redshift bins with the four AKARI bands at 11, 15, 18 and 24 microns (0.15 < z < 0.49, 0.75 < z < 1.34, 1.34 < z < 1.7 and 1.7 < z < 2.05). Our sample contains 4079 sources, 599 are securely detected with Herschel/PACS. Also adding ultraviolet (UV) data from GALEX, we fit the spectral energy distributions using the physically motivated code CIGALE to extract the star formation rate, stellar mass, dust attenuation and the AGN contribution to the total infrared luminosity ($L_{IR}$). We discuss the impact of the adopted attenuation curve and that of the wavelength coverage to estimate these physical parameters. We focus on galaxies with a luminosity close the characteristic $L^*_{IR}$ in the different redshift bins to study the evolution with redshift of the dust attenuation in these galaxies.

• The Bulletin of The Korean Astronomical Society
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• v.40 no.1
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• pp.80.3-81
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• 2015

Globular clusters (GCs) are known to have a very small amount of or no dark matter (DM). Several studies propose that GCs may have formed in individual dark halos. Thus, some of the current GCs might have a non-negligible DM content. Using the Fokker-Planck (FP) calculations, we investigate the dynamical evolution of the Galactic GCs residing in mini DM halo. We trace the initial amount of DM of 47 Tuc, NGC 1851, and M15, which is a 'disk/bulge' cluster, an 'old halo' cluster, and a 'young halo' cluster, respectively. We find that the three GCs have initially insignificant amounts of DM, less than 20 percent of the initial stellar mass of the each cluster.