Avishai Dekel studies the physical assembly of galaxies, including how they acquire the gas needed for star formation. With collaborators he used cosmological numerical simulations and clustering theory to investigate rapidly star-forming galaxies in the young Universe.
Their model showed narrow cold streams penetrating the hot gas of massive dark-matter haloes. Such inflows can supply an extended rotating galactic disk without requiring every episode of rapid star formation to be triggered by a destructive major merger. The paper distinguished smoother stream-fed growth from the rarer, more extreme merger-driven starbursts.[ref]
Cold streams in early massive hot haloes as the main mode of galaxy formation by Avishai Dekel and others. Abstract: simulations, penetrating cold streams and comparison with merger-driven formation
Portrait of Avishai Dekel
. דאגלס גוטרי (author as credited on Commons). CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Source.
