HOW DO DISKS SURVIVE MERGERS?

Abstract

We develop a general physical model for how galactic disks survive and/or are destroyed in mergers and interactions. Based on simple dynamical arguments, we show that gas primarily loses angular momentum to internal torques in a merger, induced by the gravity of the secondary. Gas within some characteristic radius, determined by the efficiency of this angular momentum loss (itself a function of the orbital parameters, mass ratio, and gas fraction of the merging galaxies), will quickly lose angular momentum to the stars sharing the perturbed host disk, fall to the center, and be consumed in a starburst. We use a similar analysis to determine where violent relaxation of the premerger stellar disks is efficient on final coalescence. Our model describes both the dissipational and dissipationless components of the merger, and allows us to predict, for a given arbitrary encounter, the stellar and gas content of the material that will survive (without significant angular momentum loss or violent relaxation) to re-form a disk in the merger remnant, versus being dissipationlessly and violently relaxed or dissipationally losing angular momentum and forming a compact central starburst. We test these predictions with a large library of hydrodynamic merger simulations, and show that they agree well (with small scatter) with the properties of simulated merger remnants as a function of merger mass ratio, orbital parameters, and gas distributions in simulations which span a wide range of parameter space in these properties as well as prescriptions for gas physics, stellar and active galactic nucleus (AGN) feedback, halo and initial disk structural properties, redshift, and galaxy masses. We show that, in an immediate (short-term) sense, the amount of stellar or gaseous disk that survives or re-forms following a given interaction can be understood purely in terms of simple, well understood gravitational physics, independent of the details of the interstellar medium gas physics or stellar and AGN feedback. This allows us to demonstrate and quantify how these physics are in fact important, in an indirect sense, to enable disks to survive mergers by lowering star formation efficiencies in low-mass systems (allowing them to retain large gas fractions) and distributing the gas to large radii. The efficiency of disk destruction in mergers is a strong function of gas content—our model allows us to explicitly predict and demonstrate how, in sufficiently gas-rich mergers (with quite general orbital parameters), even 1:1 mass-ratio mergers can yield disk-dominated remnants, and more realistic 1:3–1:4 mass-ratio major mergers can yield systems with <20% of their mass in bulges. We discuss a number of implications of this modeling for the abundance and morphology of bulges as a function of mass and redshift, and provide simple prescriptions for the implementation of our results in analytic or semianalytic models of galaxy formation.