How effective is harassment on infalling late-type dwarfs?

TL;DR

This study models the tidal harassment of low-mass, late-type dwarf galaxies infalling into a Virgo-like galaxy cluster, finding that most experience only mild effects, with strong transformations being rare and orbit-dependent.

Contribution

Introduces a new harassment model tailored for low-mass dwarf galaxies and assesses the statistical likelihood of various harassment outcomes based on orbital parameters.

Findings

Most dwarf galaxies experience mild harassment with minimal stellar loss.

Strong morphological transformations are rare, occurring in less than 15% of infalls.

Harassment effects are highly dependent on the galaxy's orbit within the cluster.

Abstract

A new harassment model is presented that models the complex, and dynamical tidal field of a Virgo like galaxy cluster. The model is applied to small, late-type dwarf disc galaxies (of substantially lower mass than in previous harassment simulations) as they infall into the cluster from the outskirts. These dwarf galaxies are only mildly affected by high speed tidal encounters with little or no observable consequences; typical stellar losses are $<10\%$, producing very low surface brightness streams ($\mu_B > 31$ mag arcsec$^{-2}$), and a factor of two drop in dynamical mass-to-light ratio. Final stellar discs remain disc-like, and dominated by rotation although often with tidally induced spiral structure. By means of Monte-Carlo simulations, the statistically likely influences of harassment on infalling dwarf galaxies are determined. The effects of harassment are found to be highly dependent on the orbit of the galaxy within the cluster, such that newly accreted dwarf galaxies typically suffer only mild harassment. Strong tidal encounters, that can morphologically transform discs into spheroidals, are rare occurring in $<15 \%$ of dwarf galaxy infalls for typical orbits of sub-structure within $\Lambda$CDM cluster mass halos. For orbits with small apocentric distances ($<$250 kpc), harassment is significantly stronger resulting in complete disruption or heavy mass loss ($>90 \%$ dark matter and $> 50 \%$ stellar), however, such orbits are expected to be highly improbable for newly infalling galaxies due to the deep potential well of the cluster.