We present a discovery of a giant stellar halo in NGC 6822, a dwarf irregular galaxy in the Local Group. This halo is mostly made of old red giants, showing striking features: 1) it is several times larger than the main body of the galaxy seen in the optical images, and 2) it is elongated in the direction almost perpendicular to the HI disk of NGC 6822. The structure of this stellar halo looks similar to the shape of dwarf elliptical galaxies, indicating that the halos of dwarf irregular galaxies share the same origin with those of the dwarf elliptical galaxies.

We use recent observations of the HI mass function to constrain the amount of cold gas in dark matter halos. It is found that the cold gas mass in a halo decreases rapidly with decreasing halo mass for low-mass halos with $M<10^{12} h^{-1}{\rm M_\odot}$. This result is in conflict with the standard model, in which most of the gas in a low-mass halo is assumed to settle into a gaseous disk, and the cold gas is depleted by star formation and supernova-driven outflow until the disk becomes gravitationally stable. Heating by the UV background can reduce the amount of cold gas in halos with masses $<10^{10} h^{-1}{\rm M}_\odot$, but is insufficient to explain the observational result. A consistent model can be found if low-mass halos are embedded in a preheated medium, with a specific gas entropy $\sim 10\,{\rm keV\,cm^{2}}$. Such a model can also explain why the faint-end slope of the galaxy luminosity function is flat. We propose a preheating model in which the medium around low-mass halos is preheated by gravitational pancaking. Since large-scale tidal fields tend to suppress the formation of low-mass virialised halos while promoting the formation of pancakes, the formation of massive pancakes may precede that of low-mass dark halos at the present time. ‘Previrialisation’ of such pancakes can heat the intergalactic medium. The preheated gas has a cooling time longer than the age of the Universe at $z\lesssim 2$, and has a specific entropy comparable to that required to reduce the amount of cold gas and star formation activity in galaxy halos.

We report the current results of our on-going search for molecular hydrogen (H$_2$) in damped Lyman-$\alpha$ (DLA) and sub-DLA systems at $1.8<z_{\rm abs}<3.4$ using the Ultraviolet and Visible Echelle Spectrograph (UVES) installed at the ESO's Very Large Telescope (VLT), Unit Kueyen.

The Surface Brightness Fluctuation method has been shown to be a powerful distance indicator for dwarf elliptical galaxies to very low surface brightness levels. It is applicable to stellar systems that are out of reach for classical indicators requiring resolved stellar populations such as the tip magnitude of the red giant branch. I briefly discuss a few results from recent SBF studies of dEs to demonstrate the significance of the SBF method to address longstanding issues related to cosmography, dark matter in galaxy groups, substructures in clusters, and the discrepancy between the mass function of collapsed objects and the faint end of the galaxy luminosity function. For the analysis of the large number of galaxy images that need to be processed as part of such SBF studies we are currently developing a fast, semi-automatic reduction pipeline that will be made readily available to the astronomical community.

We study properties of globular cluster candidates (GCCs) and the diffuse stellar populations in nearby low surface brightness dwarf galaxies, using HST WFPC2 photometry in the V and I bands. Our sample consists of 18 dwarf spheroidal (dSph), 36 dwarf irregular (dIrr), and 3 transition-type galaxies, with projected linear diameters less than 3.5 kpc and mean blue surface brightness $>23$ mag/arcsec$^2$ situated at the distance 2–6 Mpc in the field and in nearby groups. Our sample dwarf spheroidal galaxies were not detected in HI and are located at the distances of up to $\sim$1 Mpc away from a nearby bright galaxy. Transition-type galaxies, which are distributed like dSph galaxies, form a very rare class of galaxies. dIrr galaxies show a weaker concentration to the nearest massive neighbors than dSph and transition-type galaxies. At a given surface brightness and luminosity, they exhibit lower mean metallicities than dSphs. In contrast to dIrr galaxies, the majority of dSph galaxies at a similar mean surface brightness contains GCCs. The percentage of GCCs located near the centers of dSph galaxies is much higher than that for dIrr galaxies. The composite population of GCCs in dSphs is spatially more concentrated than in dIrr galaxies. The color distributions of GCCs in dSph and dIrr galaxies show major differences. While the latter shows obvious bimodality with the peaks near $(V-I)_0 \sim 0.5$ and $\sim$1.0 mag, the GCC color distribution in dSph galaxies shows only one peak with a mean color $(V-I)_0 \sim 1.0$ mag. There is a tendency of increasing half-light radii with increasing projected galactocentric distances for a large number of GCCs in dSph galaxies, which is also observed in the Galactic globular cluster system. We embarked on a spectroscopic survey of GCCs in low-mass galaxies to obtain their chemical compositions and relative ages.

The propagation of cosmological ionisation fronts (I-fronts) during reionisation is strongly influenced by small-scale structure. Here we summarise our recent attempts to understand the effect of this small-scale structure. We present high resolution cosmological N-body simulations at high-z ($z>6$) which resolve a wide range of halo mass, from mini-halos to clusters of large, rare halos. We also study how mini-halos affect I-fronts, through simulations of mini-halo photo-evaporation including numerical gas dynamics with radiative transfer. Furthermore, we modify the I-front propagation equations to account for evolving small-scale structure, and incorporate these results into a semi-analytical reionisation model. When intergalactic medium clumping and mini-halo clustering around sources are included, small-scale structure affects reionisation by slowing it down and extending it in time. This helps to explain the observations of the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe, which imply an early and extended reionisation epoch. We also study how source clustering affects the evolution and size of H II regions, finding, in agreement with simulations, that H II regions usually expand, and rarely shrink. Hence, “relic H II regions” are an exception, rather than the rule. When the suppression of small-mass sources in already-ionised regions by Jeans-mass filtering is accounted for, H II regions are smaller, delaying overlap. We also present a new numerical method for radiative transfer which is fast, efficient and easily coupled to hydrodynamics and N-body codes, along with sample tests and applications.

We present preliminary results of 3-D hydro simulations of the interstellar medium evolution in dwarf spheroidal galaxies undergoing star formation for the first time. The star formation is assumed to occur in a sequence of instantaneus bursts separated by quiescent periods. Different models are made changing the number and the intensity of the bursts in such a way that the final mass of the formed stars remains the same. We followed the enrichment of the ISM taking into account the contribution of both type Ia and II supernovae. The aim of our models is to find a star formation history compatible with the observed spread of stellar age and metallicity in such galaxies and to reproduce the observed mass-metallicity relation.

HE0512–3329 is a gravitationally-lensed double QSO with damped Ly$\alpha$ systems observed at $z=0.931$ in front of both QSO images (DLA A and B). We have obtained spatially resolved HST STIS and optical VLT UVES spectra of both QSOs in order to study differences in the metal abundances across the lines of sight. We detect substantial differences, of roughly 0.5 dex, in both [Mn/H] and [Fe/H], on a transverse scale of 5 $h^{-1}$ kpc. Differential dust depletion appears as the most plausible explanation.

We consider the feedback effects of the early reionization on the formation of small galaxies. For this purpose, we perform 3D radiation hydrodynamic simulations with incorporating the radiative transfer for ionizing photons. As a result, it is found that the early reionization is so devastating for low mass systems with $M_{\rm vir} \lesssim 10^8 M_\odot$ or $v_{\rm circ} \lesssim 20 {\rm km/s}$, and almost all gas is photo-evaporated in more than 95% of low mass systems. These results indicate that the low mass dwarf galaxies are not formed directly from isolated CDM density perturbations.