Relaxation and Stripping: The Evolution of Sizes, Dispersions and Dark Matter Fractions in Major and Minor Mergers of Elliptical Galaxies

TL;DR

This study investigates how major and minor mergers influence the size, dark matter content, and dispersions of elliptical galaxies, highlighting the roles of violent relaxation and stripping in their evolution.

Contribution

It provides new insights into the processes driving size growth and dark matter fraction increase in elliptical galaxies through collisionless mergers, with analytic corrections for virial estimates.

Findings

Minor mergers increase size and dark matter fraction significantly.

Violent relaxation dominates in major mergers, affecting dark matter distribution.

Size growth exponent exceeds simple theoretical limits, reaching about 2.4.

Abstract

We revisit collisionless major and minor mergers of spheroidal galaxies in the context of the size evolution of elliptical galaxies. The simulations are performed as a series of mergers with mass-ratios of 1:1 and 1:10 for models representing pure bulges as well as bulges embedded in dark matter halos. For major and minor mergers, respectively, we identify and analyze two different processes, violent relaxation and stripping, leading to size evolution and a change of the dark matter fraction within the observable effective radius. Violent relaxation - which is the dominant mixing process for major mergers but less important for minor mergers - scatters relatively more dark matter particles than bulge particles to small. Stripping in minor mergers assembles stellar satellite particles at large radii in halo dominated regions of the massive host. This strongly increases the size of the bulge into regions with higher dark matter fractions leaving the inner host structure almost unchanged. A factor of two mass increase by minor mergers increases the dark matter fraction by 20 per cent. We present analytic corrections to simple one-component virial estimates for the evolution of the gravitational radii. If such a two-component system grows by minor mergers alone its size growth, $r_{\mathrm{e}} \propto M^\alpha$, reaches values of $\alpha \approx 2.4$, significantly exceeding the simple theoretical limit of $\alpha = 2$. For major mergers the sizes grow with $\alpha \lesssim 1$. Our results indicate that minor mergers of galaxies embedded in massive dark matter halos provide a potential mechanism for explaining the rapid size growth and the build-up of massive elliptical systems predicting significant dark matter fractions and radially biased velocity dispersions at large radii (abbreviated)