| The Effects of Gas on Morphological Transformation in Mergers: Implications for Bulge and Disk Demographics (2009) | |||||||||
Abstract | |||||||||
| Transformation of disks into spheroids via mergers is a well-accepted element of galaxy formation models. However, recent simulations have shown that bulge formation is suppressed in increasingly gas-rich mergers. We investigate the global implications of these results in a cosmological framework, using independent approaches: empirical halo-occupation models (where galaxies are populated in halos according to observations) and semi-analytic models. In both, ignoring the effects of gas in mergers leads to the well-known over-production of spheroids at low masses: low and intermediate-mass galaxies are inescapably predicted to be bulge-dominated (B/T~0.5 at . Comment: 19 pages, 13 figures, submitted to MNRAS | |||||||||
Publication details | |||||||||
| |||||||||