Semi-Analytical Galaxies in the MultiDark-Universe - A perspective on the evolution of the most luminous and massive galaxies throughout cosmic history

The formation and evolution of galaxies within a self-consistent cosmological context is one of the outstanding and most challenging topics of modern astrophysics. This dissertation is dedicated to investigating the concepts of galaxy formation with cosmology, in particular, the formation of large-scale structures and the assembly and evolution of their associated galaxies over cosmic time. Over the last decades a lot of effort has been invested into the development of models able to produce statistically significant sets of galaxy properties in a computationally efficient way. These models include the population of dark matter halos using simplified phenomenological treatments of baryonic processes and coarse-graining the properties of galaxies. As a result, relevant equation systems can be solved more efficiently – a semi-analytical model (SAM) was born. We have shown throughout this thesis than semi-analytical models are an exceptional resourceful method of study statistically significant samples of galaxy properties. We could identify modelled galaxy samples which exhibit the same properties and are truly comparable with observational samples as e.g. SDSS or BOSS-CMASS. We could trace a population of luminous red galaxies selected at low redshift and found their corresponding CMASS-mock sample galaxies at z ∼ 0.5. We identified key galaxy proper-ties which show strong bimodalities and correlations with star formation related properties, halo mass, and environment. We show the full mass growth history for the most distinct samples ofCMASS-mock galaxies: red and blue; and traced their progenitors back to high redshift. We found that those samples have been assembled at different cosmic times, most properly through-out different evolutionary paths. In summary, within this thesis work we presented interesting correlations of populations of luminous red galaxies with their large-scale environment and draw conclusions on their formation and evolution using a semi-analytical model. We conclude this thesis with an outlook on further works and emphasis the conduction of full-encompassing studies exploring all possible parameter spaces form small to large scales, incorporating isolated and dens environments, as well as taking advantage of all available astrophysical and computational resources; from the brightest cluster to the highest redshift ... to be continued. Download it here: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/rwimmgf1cjl2amd/AAB1NUwWTMCKa3wo3S4eBx9ra?dl=0