Encounters between spherical galaxies – I. Systems without a dark halo

[EN]We report here on a survey of N-body simulations of encounters between spherical galaxies. Initial systems are isotropic Jaffe models. Different sets of mass ratios, impact parameters and orbital energies are studied. Both merger remnants and systems perturbed after a non-merging encounter are a...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores: González-García, A. César, van Albada, T. S.
Tipo de recurso: artículo
Fecha de publicación:2005
País:España
Institución:Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC)
Repositorio:DIGITAL.CSIC. Repositorio Institucional del CSIC
OAI Identifier:oai:digital.csic.es:10261/75052
Acceso en línea:http://hdl.handle.net/10261/75052
Access Level:acceso abierto
Palabra clave:Methods: N-body simulations
Galaxies: elliptical and lenticular, cD
Galaxies: interactions
Galaxies: kinematics and dynamics
Galaxies: structure
Incipit
Institute of Heritage Sciences
Instituto de Ciencias del Patrimonio
Descripción
Sumario:[EN]We report here on a survey of N-body simulations of encounters between spherical galaxies. Initial systems are isotropic Jaffe models. Different sets of mass ratios, impact parameters and orbital energies are studied. Both merger remnants and systems perturbed after a non-merging encounter are analysed and compared to real-life elliptical galaxies. The properties of merger remnants show a large variety. Merger remnants resulting from head-on encounters are mainly non-rotating prolate spheroids. Merger remnants from models with Jorb≠ 0 are tri-axial or mildly oblate spheroids, supported in part by rotation. The velocity distributions are biased towards the radial direction in the prolate case and the tangential direction in the oblate case. Non-mergers are affected in various ways, depending on the orbital characteristics. We conclude that many of the global properties of real-life ellipticals can, in principle, be attributed to a merger of spherical progenitors.