We follow the dynamical and chemical evolution of isolated systems tuned in their properties on selfgravitating spherical three component (gas+stars+dark matter) dwarf spheroidal galaxies (dSph). The system starts as a strongly dark matter dominated cuspy density profile. It is shown that after few Gyr of evolution the star formation processes are naturally able to reshape the cuspy dark matter profile into a flatter one. The same family of models is then evolved by orbiting in a Milky Way external potential in order to investigate the history of the Carina dwarf galaxy. Structural parameters and the star formation history of Carina are self-consistently determined in good agreement with the observations.

We use cosmological hydrodynamic simulations to model galaxy formation at redshift 5 and higher. We explore how galaxies populate dark matter halos, focusing on the implications for the clustering properties of galaxies in the context of current and future deep surveys. We find a significant trend for galaxies with high gas fractions to lie in denser environments than gas poor galaxies of the same halo mass, as reflected by their different clustering strengths.

Samples of line-of-sight velocities and metallicities for hundreds individual red giant branch stars in Milky Way satellite galaxies have been obtained in the recent past thanks to wide-area multi-object spectrographs on 8 m–10 m class telescopes. These samples have greatly improved our knowledge of the large scale metallicity properties and the internal kinematics of the Milky Way satellites, uncovering in several of these systems the presence of multiple stellar components, velocity gradients and allowing more accurate mass determinations.

With the current instrumentation this kind of studies are already challenging at the outskirts of the Local Group, limiting the variety of galaxy types and environments that we can explore at a similar degree of detail.

With its 42 m diameter, the European Extremely Large Telescope (E-ELT) represents the project for the largest ground-based optical-infrared telescope in the world. In this contribution I discuss results from simulations I have carried out on the feasibility of intermediate resolution spectroscopic surveys in the near-infrared CaII triplet region for large samples of individual red giant branch stars in galaxies at the outskirts of the Local Group and beyond.

It is well known that the intergalactic or intracluster medium (IGM, ICM) is pervaded by a weak magnetic field, along with a population of relativistic particles. Both, particles and fields must have been injected into the IGM either by Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN) or by normal star-forming galaxies. Excellent candidates for the latter are starburst dwarf galaxies, which in the framework of hierarchical structure formation must have been around in large numbers. One should hence be able to detect extended synchrotron halos of formerly highly relativistic particles around local starburst or post-starburst dwarf galaxies. With LOFAR, one should easily find these out to the Coma Cluster and beyond.