February 27, 2004
We report on the merger-induced generation of a shock-heated gas wind and formation of a remnant gas halo in simulations of colliding disk galaxies. The simulations use cosmologically motivated initial conditions and include the effects of radiative cooling, star formation, stellar feedback and the non-adiabatic heating of gas. The non-adiabatic heating, i.e. shocks, generated in the final merger forces gas out of the central region of the merger remnant and into the dark-matter halo. We demonstrate that the amount of heating depends on the size of the progenitor disk galaxy as well as the initial orbit the galaxies are placed on. Based upon these dependencies, we motivate a possible recipe for including this effect in semi-analytic models of galaxy formation.
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January 23, 2009
Galaxy merger simulations have explored the behaviour of gas within the galactic disk, yet the dynamics of hot gas within the galaxy halo has been neglected. We report on the results of high-resolution hydrodynamic simulations of colliding galaxies with hot halo gas. We explore a range of mass ratios, gas fractions and orbital configurations to constrain the shocks and gas dynamics within the progenitor haloes. We find that : (i) A strong shock is produced in the galaxy haloe...
April 1, 2011
Cosmological hydrodynamical simulations as well as observations indicate that spiral galaxies are comprised of five different components: dark matter halo, stellar disc, stellar bulge, gaseous disc and gaseous halo. While the first four components have been extensively considered in numerical simulations of binary galaxy mergers, the effect of a hot gaseous halo has usually been neglected even though it can contain up to 80% of the total gas within the galaxy virial radius. W...
April 6, 2005
We examine X-ray emission produced from hot gas during collisions and mergers of disk galaxies. To study this process, we employ simulations that incorporate cosmologically motivated disk-galaxy models and include the effects of radiative cooling, star formation, supernova feedback, and accreting supermassive black holes. We find that during a merger, the colliding gas in the disks is shock-heated to X-ray-emitting temperatures. The X-ray luminosity is spatially extended, ris...
March 16, 2005
(Abridged) The violent hierarchical nature of the LCDM cosmology poses serious difficulties for the formation of disk galaxies. To help resolve these issues, we describe a new, merger-driven scenario for the cosmological formation of disk galaxies at high redshifts that supplements the standard model based on dissipational collapse.In this picture, large gaseous disks may be produced from high-angular momentum mergers of systems that are gas-dominated, i.e. M_gas/(M_gas +M_st...
January 11, 2007
(Abridged) The thermal history of the intracluster medium (ICM) is complex. Heat input from cluster mergers, AGN, and galaxy winds offsets and may even halt the cooling of the ICM. Consequently, the processes that set the properties of the ICM play a key role in determining how galaxies form. In this paper we focus on the shock heating of the ICM during cluster mergers, with the eventual aim of incorporating this mechanism into semi-analytic models of galaxy formation. We u...
October 28, 2009
Minor accretion events with mass ratio M_sat : M_host ~ 1:10 are common in the context of LCDM cosmology. We use high-resolution simulations of Galaxy-analogue systems to show that these mergers can dynamically eject disk stars into a diffuse light component that resembles a stellar halo both spatially and kinematically. For a variety of orbital configurations, we find that ~3-5e8 M_sun of primary stellar disk material is ejected to a distance larger than 5 kpc above the gala...
October 19, 2012
We present a new approach to study galaxy evolution in a cosmological context. We combine cosmological merger trees and semi-analytic models of galaxy formation to provide the initial conditions for multi-merger hydrodynamic simulations. In this way we exploit the advantages of merger simulations (high resolution and inclusion of the gas physics) and semi-analytic models (cosmological background and low computational cost), and integrate them to create a novel tool. This appr...
August 8, 2011
We employ hydrodynamical simulations to study the effects of dissipational gas physics on the vertical heating and thickening of disc galaxies during minor mergers. For the first time we present a suite of simulations that includes a diffuse, rotating, cooling, hot gaseous halo, as predicted by cosmological hydrodynamical simulations as well as models of galaxy formation. We study the effect of this new gaseous component on the vertical structure of a Milky Way-like stellar d...
January 15, 2002
Observations indicate that much of the interstellar gas in merging galaxies may settle into extended gaseous disks. Here, I present simulations of disk formation in mergers of gas-rich galaxies. Up to half of the total gas settles into embedded disks; the most massive instances result from encounters in which both galaxies are inclined to the orbital plane. These disks are often warped, many have rather complex kinematics, and roughly a quarter have counter-rotating or otherw...
May 23, 2003
We summarize the results of numerical simulations of colliding gas-rich disk galaxies in which the impact velocity is set parallel to the spin axes of the two galaxies. The effects of varying the impact speed are studied with particular attention to the resulting gaseous structures and shockwave patterns, and the time needed to produce these structures. The simulations employ an N-body treatment of the stars and dark matter, together with an SPH treatment of the gas, in which...