2004/02/27 by T. J. Cox, Joel Primack, Patrik Jonsson +2 · 2 citations
Engineering · Physics and Astronomy · #Astronomy and Astrophysical Research #Galaxies: Formation, Evolution, Phenomena #Space Technology and Applications #astro-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.1086/421905
published as Astrophys.J.607:L87-L90,2004 · 4 pages, 2 figures, uses emulateapj.cls, submitted to ApJ Letters
arxiv created 2004/02/27 · openalex publication_date 2004/04/29 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2016/06/24 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
We report on the merger-induced generation of a shock-heated gas wind and the 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 nonadiabatic heating of gas. The nonadiabatic 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 on which the galaxies are placed. On the basis of these dependencies, we motivate a possible recipe for including this effect in semianalytic models of galaxy formation.