Related papers: Dynamical consequences of CDM merger trees
In the CDM cosmological framework structures grow from merging with smaller structures. Merging should have observable effects on galaxies including destroying disks and creating spheroids. This proceeding aims to give a brief overview of…
Planet-planet collisions are a common outcome of instability in systems of transiting planets close to the star, as well as occurring during in-situ formation of such planets from embryos. Previous N-body studies of instability amongst…
The intrinsic anisotropy delta and flattening epsilon of simulated merger remnants is compared with elliptical galaxies that have been observed by the SAURON collaboration, and that were analysed using axisymmetric Schwarzschild models.…
We explore the formation of alpha-enhanced and metal-rich stellar populations in the nuclei of luminous ellipticals under the assumption of two extreme galaxy formation scenarios based on hierarchical clustering, namely a fast clumpy…
Modelling the growth histories of specific galaxies often involves generating the entire population of objects that arise in a given cosmology and selecting systems with appropriate properties. This approach is highly inefficient when…
With the goal to refine modelling of shell galaxies and the use of shells to probe the merger history, we develop a new method for implementing dynamical friction in test-particle simulations of radial minor mergers. The friction is…
Recent work has suggested that the amplitude of the size mass relation of massive early type galaxies evolves with redshift. Here we use a semi-analytical galaxy formation model to study the size evolution of massive early type galaxies. We…
We perform numerical simulations of galaxy mergers between star-forming and gas-rich spirals in order to explore the origin of the Fundamental Plane (FP) of elliptical galaxies. We consider particularly that the origin of the slope of the…
We perform collisionless N-body simulations to investigate whether binary mergers between rotationally-supported dwarfs can lead to the formation of dwarf spheroidal galaxies (dSphs). Our simulation campaign is based on a hybrid approach…
The projected kinematical properties of unequal-mass merger remnants of disk galaxies are analysed and shown to agree well with observations of disky, fast rotating elliptical galaxies. This supports the major merger hypothesis of…
The bimodal globular cluster (GC) metallicity distributions of many giant elliptical galaxies are often cited as evidence for the formation of such galaxies through mergers involving gas-rich spirals. In such models, the metal- rich GCs are…
A growing body of observational evidence suggests that the luminosity, photometric shape and amount of rotational or anisotropical support in elliptical galaxies may provide vital clues to how they formed. Elliptical galaxies appear to fall…
Supermassive black holes (SMBHs) are ubiquitous in galaxies with a sizable mass. It is expected that a pair of SMBHs originally in the nuclei of two merging galaxies would form a binary and eventually coalesce via a burst of gravitational…
We explore the effects of dissipationless merging on the Fundamental Plane of elliptical galaxies by using a N-body code based on a new, high performance numerical scheme (Dehnen 2002). We investigate the extreme cases of galaxy growth by…
A six-dimensional parameter space based on high-resolution numerical simulations of isolated binary galaxy collisions has been constructed to investigate the dynamical friction timescales, $\tau_{\rm mer}$, for major mergers. Our…
We study a possible formation mechanism for elliptical/S0 galaxies using N-body simulations with GRAPE. A close galaxy encounter which does not lead to a merger can induce a strong bar in an initially axisymmetric disk. This bar is unstable…
The kinematical properties of elliptical galaxies formed during the mergers of equal mass, stars+gas+dark matter spiral galaxies are compared to the observed low velocity dispersions found for planetary nebulae on the outskirts of…
Three billion years after the big bang (at redshift z=2), half of the most massive galaxies were already old, quiescent systems with little to no residual star formation and extremely compact with stellar mass densities at least an order of…
In our hierarchical structure-formation paradigm, the observed morphological evolution of massive galaxies -- from rotationally-supported discs to dispersion-dominated spheroids -- is largely explained via galaxy merging. However, since…
We investigate the formation history of massive disk galaxies in hydro-dynamical simulation--the IllustrisTNG, to study why massive disk galaxies survive through cosmic time. 83 galaxies in the simulation are selected with M$_{*,z=0}$…