Encounters between spherical galaxies - II. Systems with a dark halo

González-García, A. C.; van Albada, T. S.
Bibliographical reference

Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, Volume 361, Issue 3, pp. 1043-1054.

Advertised on:
8
2005
Number of authors
2
IAC number of authors
1
Citations
27
Refereed citations
27
Description
We perform N-body simulations of encounters between spherical systems surrounded by a spherical halo. Following a preceding paper with a similar aim, the initial systems include a spherical Jaffe model for the luminous matter and a Hernquist model for the halo. The merger remnants from this sample are mainly slowly rotating, prolate spheroids with a radially anisotropic velocity distribution. The results are compared with real-life ellipticals and with the models without halo in Paper I. We argue that elliptical galaxies with evidence of dark matter could be formed in the field via a merger of spheroids surrounded by a dark matter halo, while ellipticals with no evidence of dark matter might be formed via a merger of two spheroids in a cluster.