Journal
MONTHLY NOTICES OF THE ROYAL ASTRONOMICAL SOCIETY
Volume 419, Issue 3, Pages 2163-2172Publisher
WILEY-BLACKWELL
DOI: 10.1111/j.1365-2966.2011.19867.x
Keywords
methods: analytical; methods: numerical; galaxies: formation; galaxies: kinematics and dynamics
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Funding
- NSF Office of Cyberinfrastructure [PHY-0941373]
- Michigan State University Institute for Cyber-Enabled Research
- Department of Energy through the Los Alamos National Laboratory Institute for Geophysics and Planetary Physics
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By means of N-body simulations, we study the response of a galactic disc to a minor merger event. We find that non-self-gravitating, spiral-like features are induced in the thick disc. As we have shown in a previous work, this ringing also leaves an imprint in velocity space (the uv plane) in small spatial regions, such as the solar neighbourhood. As the disc relaxes after the event, clumps in the uv plane get closer with time, allowing us to estimate the time of impact. In addition to confirming the possibility of this diagnostic, here we show that in a more realistic scenario, the infall trajectory of the perturber gives rise to an azimuthal dependence of the structure in phase space. We also find that the space defined by the energy and angular momentum of stars is a better choice than velocity space, as clumps remain visible even in large local volumes. This makes their observational detection much easier since one need not be restricted to a small spatial volume. We show that information about the time of impact, the mass of the perturber and its trajectory is stored in the kinematics of disc stars.
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