Halo Pairs in the Millennium Simulation: Love & Deception

Abstract

In this work I investigate the statistical properties of a huge catalog of closely interacting pairs of dark matter haloes, extracted from the Millennium Simulation database. Only haloes that reach a minimum mass greater than 8.6 \times 10^10 Msun/h (corresponding to 100 particles) are considered. Close pairs are selected if they come within a critical distance dcrit. I explore the effects of replacing dcrit = 1 Mpc/h with 200 kpc/h on the evolution of separations, lifetimes, total masses and mass ratios of these pairs.

To appear on the Proceedings of the Conference "Galaxy Mergers in an Evolving Universe", held in Hualien, Taiwan, on October 23-28, 2011