The importance of dry and wet merging on the formation and evolution of elliptical galaxies

Abstract

With the aid of a simple yet robust approach we investigate the influence of dissipationless and dissipative merging on galaxy structure, and the consequent effects on the scaling laws followed by elliptical galaxies. Our results suggest that ellipticals cannot be originated by parabolic merging of low mass spheroids only, even in presence of substantial gas dissipation. However, we also found that scaling laws such as the Faber-Jackson, Kormendy, Fundamental Plane, and the Mbh -sigma relations, when considered over the whole mass range spanned by ellipticals in the local universe, are robust against merging. We conclude that galaxy scaling laws, possibly established at high redshift by the fast collapse in pre-existing dark matter halos of gas rich and clumpy stellar distributions, are compatible with a (small) number of galaxy mergers at lower redshift.

31 pages, 7 figures, accepted by ApJ (main journal)

References in corpus (6)

• Ages and metallicities of early-type galaxies in the SDSS: new insight into the physical origin of the colour-magnitude and the Mg2-sigmaV relations
• Dissipationless Mergers of Elliptical Galaxies and the Evolution of the Fundamental Plane
• The Dissipative Merger Progenitors of Elliptical Galaxies
• Dissipationless collapse, weak homology and central cores of elliptical galaxies
• Clues on Regularity in the Structure and Kinematics of Elliptical Galaxies from Self-consistent Hydrodynamical Simulations: the Dynamical Fundamental Plane
• Interactions, Mergers and the Fundamental Mass Relations of Galaxies

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