The Morphological Evolution of Merger Remnants

Abstract

Elliptical galaxies formed in a major merger tend to become more nearly spherical with time, thanks to the gravitational effect of their central black hole (or black holes). Observational results indicate that elliptical galaxies with older stellar populations (t > 7.5 Gyr) have rounder central isophotes than ellipticals with younger stellar populations. In addition, older ellipticals tend to have core profiles, while younger ellipticals tend to have power-law profiles. Numerical simulations of galaxy mergers indicate that if one or both of the progenitors have a central black hole with a mass around 0.2 percent of the mass in stars, then the effect of the black hole(s) is to make the central regions of the remnant rounder, with a characteristic time of a few gigayears.

8 pages, 4 figures, to appear in the proceedings of the Yale Cosmology Workshop, `The Shapes of Galaxies and Their Halos'