The lives of high-redshift mergers

We present a comparative study of recent works on merger time-scales with dynamical friction and find a strong contrast between idealized/isolated mergers and mergers from a cosmological volume. Our study measures the duration of mergers in a cosmological N-body simulation of dark matter, with empha...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Monthly notices of the Royal Astronomical Society 2012-07, Vol.424 (1), p.361-371
Main Authors: McCavana, Tom, Micic, Miroslav, Lewis, Geraint F., Sinha, Manodeep, Sharma, Sanjib, Holley-Bockelmann, Kelly, Bland-Hawthorn, Joss
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Astrophysics
Cosmology
Dark matter
galaxies: evolution
galaxies: kinematics and dynamics
Simulation
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Summary:We present a comparative study of recent works on merger time-scales with dynamical friction and find a strong contrast between idealized/isolated mergers and mergers from a cosmological volume. Our study measures the duration of mergers in a cosmological N-body simulation of dark matter, with emphasis on higher redshifts (z≤ 10) and a lower mass range. In our analysis we consider and compare two merger definitions: tidal disruption and coalescence. We find that the merger-time formula proposed by Jiang et al. describes our results well and conclude that cosmologically motivated merger-time formulae provide a more versatile and statistically robust approximation for practical applications such as semi-analytic/hybrid models.
ISSN:0035-8711
1365-2966
DOI:10.1111/j.1365-2966.2012.21202.x