Creating lenticular galaxies with major mergers
Abstract
Lenticular galaxies (S0s) represent the majority of early-type galaxies in the local Universe, but their formation channels are still poorly understood. While galaxy mergers are obvious pathways to suppress star formation and increase bulge sizes, the marked parallelism between spiral and lenticular galaxies (e.g. photometric bulge-disc coupling) seemed to rule out a potential merger origin. Here, we summarise our recent work in which we have shown, through N-body numerical simulations, that disc-dominated lenticulars can emerge from major mergers of spiral galaxies, in good agreement with observational photometric scaling relations. Moreover, we show that mergers simultaneously increase the light concentration and reduce the angular momentum relative to their spiral progenitors. This explains the mismatch in angular momentum and concentration between spirals and lenticulars recently revealed by CALIFA observations, which is hard to reconcile with simple fading mechanisms (e.g. ram-pressure stripping).
Cite
@article{arxiv.1605.01910,
title = {Creating lenticular galaxies with major mergers},
author = {Miguel Querejeta and M. Carmen Eliche-Moral and Trinidad Tapia and Alejandro Borlaff and Glenn van de Ven and Mariya Lyubenova and Marie Martig and Jesús Falcón-Barroso and Jairo Méndez-Abreu and Jaime Zamorano and Jesús Gallego},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1605.01910},
year = {2017}
}
Comments
3 pages, 1 figure, Proceedings of IAU Symposium 321, "Formation and evolution of galaxy outskirts", Eds. A. Gil de Paz, J. C. Lee & J. H. Knapen, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge