Tides in colliding galaxies
Pierre-Alain Duc, Florent Renaud

TL;DR
This review explores the formation, observation, and significance of tidal tails in colliding galaxies, highlighting their role in understanding galaxy evolution, dark matter, and star formation processes through advanced simulations and multi-wavelength data.
Contribution
It synthesizes recent advances in numerical simulations, observations, and theoretical understanding of tidal tails, emphasizing their importance in galactic archaeology and evolution studies.
Findings
Tidal tails contain stars, gas, and dust similar to galactic disks.
They can host star formation and dwarf galaxy formation.
Deep surveys reveal many low-surface brightness structures.
Abstract
Long tails and streams of stars are the most noticeable upshots of galaxy collisions. Their origin as gravitational, tidal, disturbances has however been recognized only less than fifty years ago and more than ten years after their first observations. This Review describes how the idea of galactic tides emerged, in particular thanks to the advances in numerical simulations, from the first ones that included tens of particles to the most sophisticated ones with tens of millions of them and state-of-the-art hydrodynamical prescriptions. Theoretical aspects pertaining to the formation of tidal tails are then presented. The third part of the review turns to observations and underlines the need for collecting deep multi-wavelength data to tackle the variety of physical processes exhibited by collisional debris. Tidal tails are not just stellar structures, but turn out to contain all the…
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