The effects of the orbital configurations of mergers on reshaping galaxy structures

TL;DR

This study systematically analyzes how different orbital configurations of galaxy mergers influence the resulting galaxy structures, revealing correlations between merger types and structural components like bulge, disk, and stellar halo.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive analysis of the impact of merger orbital configurations on galaxy structure formation using a large simulation dataset.

Findings

Merger orbital configurations significantly affect the fractions of galaxy structural components.

Mergers on spiral-in orbits tend to preserve disk components, while direct collisions increase bulge and stellar halo fractions.

Most mergers (93%) lead to an increase in the hot inner stellar halo.

Abstract

We performed a systematic analysis of how the orbital configuration of a merger can influence the structural formation of remnant galaxies using 531 merger pairs selected from IllustrisTNG-100. We comprehensively described the merger orbital configuration, considering the relative orbital motion of the merger pair and their disk orientations. We quantified the galaxy structures by dynamically defining four components: bulge, disk, warm component, and hot inner stellar halo. For mergers on spiral-in orbits, the disk planes of the two merging galaxies tend to be aligned with the orbital plane, leading to higher fractions for the disk and warm components, as well as lower fractions for the bulge and hot inner stellar halo components in the remnant galaxy. For mergers on direct collision orbits, the disk planes of the two galaxies tend to be perpendicular to the orbital plane, leading to lower fractions for disk and warm components, as well as higher fractions of the bulge and hot inner stellar halo in the remnant. Mergers can lead to either an increase or decrease in the disk and bulge mass fraction in the remnant compared to the progenitor galaxy, depending on the merger orbital configurations; however, in 93% of cases, mergers cause an increase in the hot inner stellar halo. As a result, the luminosity fraction of the hot inner stellar halo (but not the bulge) in galaxies at $z=0$ is highly correlated with its total ex situ stellar mass. In addition, we find that merger on spiral-in orbits is one of the possible reasons for the formation of recently discovered red but HI-rich (RR) galaxies.