Thursday, October 27, 2011

1110.5727 (Sylvain Fouquet et al.)

Could M31 be the result of a major merger?    [PDF]

Sylvain Fouquet, François Hammer, Yang-Bin Yang, Jianling Wang, Mathieu Puech, Hector Flores
We investigated a scenario in which M31 could be the remnant of a gas-rich major merger. Galaxy merger simulations, highly constrained by observations, were run using GADGET 2 in order to reproduce M31. We succeeded in reproducing the global shape of M31, the thin disk and the bulge, and in addition some of the main M31 large-scale features, such as the thick disk, the 10kpc ring and the Giant Stream. This lead to a new explanation of the Giant Stream which could be caused by tidal tail stars that have been captured by the galaxy potential.
View original: http://arxiv.org/abs/1110.5727

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