Bibcode
González-García, A. C.; van Albada, T. S.
Referencia bibliográfica
Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, Volume 361, Issue 3, pp. 1030-1042.
Fecha de publicación:
8
2005
Número de citas
27
Número de citas referidas
26
Descripción
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.