The Two degree Field Galaxy Redshift Survey (2dFGRS) is used in conjunction with the Two Micron All Sky Survey (2MASS) Extended Source Catalogue (XSC) to study the near-infrared light and stellar mass content of the local Universe. Mock galaxy catalogues, constructed from cosmological N-body simulations and semi-analytical galaxy formation models, are used to gauge the accuracy with which quant...

In this contribution, I briefly review recent progress in detecting and measuring the properties of relativistic iron lines observed in stellar-mass black hole systems, and the aspects of these lines that are most relevant to studies of similar lines in Seyfert-1 AGN. In particular, the lines observed in stellar-mass black holes are not complicated by complex low-energy absorption or partial-co...

Using simple stellar population synthesis, we model the bulge stellar contribution in the optical spectrum of a narrow-line Seyfert 1 galaxy RE J1034+396. We find that its bulge stellar velocity dispersion is 67.7± 8 km s . The supermassive black hole (SMBH) mass is about (1−4)×106M⊙ if it follows the well-known MBH−σ∗ relation found in quiescent galaxies. We also derive the SMBH mass from the ...

We conduct a comprehensive analysis of the relationship between central galaxies and their host dark matter halos, as characterized by the stellar mass – halo mass (SM–HM) relation, with rigorous consideration of uncertainties. Our analysis focuses on results from the abundance matching technique, which assumes that every dark matter halo or subhalo above a specific mass threshold hosts one gal...

We use a sample of 87 rest-frame ultraviolet-selected star-forming galaxies with mean spectroscopic redshift 〈z〉 = 2.26±0.17 to study the correlation between metallicity and stellar mass at high redshift. Using stellar masses determined from spectral energy distribution fitting to UnGRJKs (and Spitzer IRAC, for 37% of the sample) photometry, we divide the sample into six bins in stellar mass, a...

The evolution of the galaxy stellar mass–star formation rate relationship (M∗−SFR) provides key constraints on the stellar mass assembly histories of galaxies. For star-forming galaxies, M∗−SFR is observed to be fairly tight with a slope close to unity from z ∼ 0 → 2, and it evolves downwards roughly independently of M∗. Simulations of galaxy formation reproduce these trends, broadly independen...

We have constructed an extended halo model (EHM) which relates the total stellar mass and star-formation rate (SFR) to halo mass (Mh). An empirical relation between the distribution functions of total stellar mass of galaxies and host halo mass, tuned to match the spatial density of galaxies over 0 < z < 2 and the clustering properties at z ∼ 0, is extended to include two different scenarios de...

As an extension of known correlations, galaxies over four decades in stellar mass are shown to obey a strong correlation between u − K colors and gas-to-stellar mass (G/S) ratios, using neutral H I gas masses and stellar mass-to-light ratios derived from optical colors. The correlation holds for G/S ratios ranging from nearly 10:1 to 1:100 for a sample obtained by merging the SDSS DR2, 2MASS, a...

A significant fraction of nearby elliptical galaxies are known to have high-density gas disks in their circumnuclear (CN) region (0.1 to a few kpc). Yet, ellipticals, especially luminous ones, show little signs of recent star formation. To investigate the possible cause of the dearth of star formation in these systems, we study the gravitational stability of CN gas disks embedded within the gra...