| The Radical Consequences of Realistic Satellite Orbits for the Heating and Implied Merger Histories of Galactic Disks (2008) | |||||||||
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| Previous models of galactic disk heating in interactions invoke restrictive assumptions not necessarily valid in modern LCDM contexts: that satellites and orbits are rigid and circular, with slow decay over many orbital times from dynamical friction. This leads to a linear scaling of disk heating with satellite mass: disk heights and velocity dispersions scale ~M_sat/M_disk. In turn, observed disk thicknesses present strong constraints on merger histories: the implication for the Milky Way is that . Comment: 14 pages, 3 figures, accepted to ApJ (minor revisions to match accepted version) | |||||||||
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