We investigated a scenario in which M31 could be the remnant of a gas-rich major merger. Galaxy merger simulations, highly constrained by observations, were run using GADGET 2 in order to reproduce M31. We succeeded in reproducing the global shape of M31, the thin disk and the bulge, and in addition some of the main M31 large-scale features, such as the thick disk, the 10kpc ring and the Giant Stream. This lead to a new explanation of the Giant Stream which could be caused by tidal tail stars that have been captured by the galaxy potential.
@article{arxiv.1110.5727,
title = {Could M31 be the result of a major merger?},
author = {Sylvain Fouquet and François Hammer and Yang-Bin Yang and Jianling Wang and Mathieu Puech and Hector Flores},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1110.5727},
year = {2015}
}
Comments
Proceedings for the conference "Assembling the puzzle of the Milky Way", 2 pages