A search for the most massive galaxies: Double Trouble?

[ABRIDGED] We aim to provide a holistic view on the typical size and kinematic evolution of massive early-type galaxies (ETGs), that encompasses their high-$z$ star-forming progenitors, their high-$z$ quiescent counterparts, and their configurations in the local Universe. Our investigation covers the main processes playing a relevant role in the cosmic evolution of ETGs. Specifically, their early fast evolution comprises: biased collapse of the low angular momentum gaseous ba...

Once understood as the paradigm of passively evolving objects, the discovery that massive galaxies experienced an enormous structural evolution in the last ten billion years has opened an active line of research. The most significant pending question in this field is the following: which mechanism has made galaxies to grow largely in size without altering their stellar populations properties dramatically? The most viable explanation is that massive galaxies have undergone a s...

Understanding the formation history of massive galaxies is one of most popular and longstanding problems in astronomy, with observations and theory addressing how and when these systems assembled. Since the most massive galaxies in today's universe, with M_*> 10^11 M_0, are nearly all elliptical with uniform old stellar populations, we must probe higher redshifts to discover their full origins. A recent consensus has developed that nearly all M_* > 10^11 M_0 galaxies we see t...

Galaxy pairs constitute the initial building blocks of galaxy evolution, which is driven through merger events and interactions. Thus, the analysis of these systems can be valuable in understanding galaxy evolution and studying structure formation. In this work, we present a new publicly available catalogue of close galaxy pairs identified using photometric redshifts provided by the Physics of the Accelerating Universe Survey (PAUS). To efficiently detect them we take advanta...

We measured stellar velocity dispersions sigma and dynamical masses of 9 massive (M~10^11 Msun) early-type galaxies (ETG) from the GMASS sample at redshift 1.4<z<2.0. The sigma are based on individual spectra for two galaxies at z~1.4 and on a stacked spectrum for 7 galaxies with 1.6<z<2.0, with 202-h of exposure at the ESO Very Large Telescope. We constructed detailed axisymmetric dynamical models for the objects, based on the Jeans equations, taking the observed surface bri...

Using a sample of nearly 20,000 massive early-type galaxies selected from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, we study the color-magnitude relation for the most luminous (L > 2.2 L^{*}) field galaxies in the redshift range 0.1<z<0.4 in several colors. The intrinsic dispersion in galaxy colors is quite small in all colors studied, but the 40 milli-mag scatter in the bluest colors is a factor of two larger than the 20 milli-mag measured in the reddest bands. While each of three simpl...

Recent studies have found that the oldest and most luminous galaxies in the early Universe are surprisingly compact, having stellar masses similar to present-day elliptical galaxies but much smaller sizes. This finding has attracted considerable attention as it suggests that massive galaxies have grown by a factor of ~five in size over the past ten billion years. A key test of these results is a determination of the stellar kinematics of one of the compact galaxies: if the si...

[Abridged] Luminous spheroids (M_V < - 21.50 +- 0.75 mag) contain partially depleted cores with sizes (R_ b) typically 0.02 - 0.5 kpc. However, galaxies with R_b > 0.5 kpc are rare and poorly understood. Here we perform detailed decompositions of the composite surface brightness profiles, extracted from archival Hubble Space Telescope and ground-based images, of 12 extremely luminous "large-core" galaxies that have R_b > 0.5 kpc and M_V < -23.50 +- 0.10 mag, fitting a core-S\...

Black hole masses predicted from the Mbh-sigma relationship conflict with those predicted from the Mbh-L relationship for the most luminous galaxies, such as brightest cluster galaxies (BCGs). This is because stellar velocity dispersion, sigma, increases only weakly with L for BCGs and other giant ellipticals. The Mbh-L relationship predicts that the most luminous BCGs may have Mbh approaching 10^{10}M_sol, while the M-sigma relationship always predicts Mbh<3X10^9M_sol. We ar...

Using the extended J, H and K magnitudes provided by the 2MASS data archive, we consider the position of brightest cluster galaxies (BCGs) in the observed relations between inferred supermassive black hole (SMBH) mass and the host galaxy properties, as well as their position in the stellar velocity dispersion and luminosity (sigma-L) relation, compared to E and S0 galaxies. We find that SMBH masses (M) derived from near-infrared (NIR) magnitudes do not exceed 10e9.5Msol and t...