Red mergers and the assembly of massive elliptical galaxies: the fundamental plane and its projections

By M. Boylan-Kolchin, Chung-Pei Ma, E. Quataert. 2006

175 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Several recent observations suggest that gas-poor (dissipationless) mergers of elliptical galaxies contribute significantly to the build-up of the massive end of the red sequence at z? 1. We perform a series of major merger simulations to investigate the spatial and velocity structure of the remnants of such mergers. Regardless of orbital energy or angular momentum, we find that the stellar remnants lie on the fundamental plane defined by their progenitors, a result of virial equilibrium with a small tilt due to an increasing central dark matter fraction. However, the locations of merger remnants in the projections of the fundamental plane - the Faber-Jackson and R e -M * relations - depend strongly on the merger orbit, and the relations steepen significantly from the canonical scalings (L ∝ σ 4 e and R e ∝ M 0.6 * ) for mergers on radial orbits. This steepening arises because stellar bulges on orbits with lower angular momentum lose less energy via dynamical friction on the dark matter haloes than do bulges on orbits with substantial angular momentum. This results in a less tightly bound remnant bulge with a smaller velocity dispersion and a larger effective radius. Our results imply that the projections of the fundamental plane - but not necessarily the plane itself - provide a powerful way of investigating the assembly history of massive elliptical galaxies, including the brightest cluster galaxies at or near the centres of galaxy clusters. We argue that most massive ellipticals are formed by anisotropic merging and that their fundamental plane projections should thus differ noticeably from those of lower mass ellipticals even though they should lie on the same fundamental plane. Current observations are consistent with this conclusion. The steepening in the L-σ e relation for luminous ellipticals may also be reflected in a corresponding steepening in the M BH-σe relation for massive black holes.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/4682e6226ce7126e7dcbca47f48794553e04714b

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Citations in the corpus

The Illustris simulation: the evolving population of black holes across cosmic time (2014, background): “Dry mergers tend to increase both black hole and stellar mass, while keeping the stellar velocity dispersion largely unchanged (see e.g. Boylan-Kolchin et al. 2006).”
The SAURON project – IX. A kinematic classification for early‐type galaxies (2007, background): “…are expected to have experienced a significantnumber of mergers with galaxies which were themselves gas-depleted (due to ram-pressure stripping, due to efficient AGN feedback, or due to earlier mergers), preferentially on radial orbits along the cosmological filaments (Boylan-Kolchin et al. 2006).”
The ATLAS3D project – XX. Mass–size and mass–σ distributions of early-type galaxies: bulge fraction drives kinematics, mass-to-light ratio, molecular gas fraction and stellar initial mass function (2012, background): “For this reason, an expectation from this picture is that BHs at the high-mass end should start to appear too massive with respect to the predictions of the MBH–σ relation (see also Nipoti et al. 2003; Boylan-Kolchin et al. 2006; Ciotti 2009).”
The black hole mass–stellar velocity dispersion correlation: bulges versus pseudo-bulges (2008, result): “Our result confirms the prediction of Boylan-Kolchin et al. (2006) that the Mbh-σ∗ relation for the core elliptical galaxies is steeper than that for the normal galaxies.”
Dynamical friction and galaxy merging time-scales (2007, background): “Shifting the peak of the circularity distribution from 0.5 to 0.42 corresponds to a 30% reduction in the pericentric distance of the orbit, which can have a significant effect on the properties of the merger remnant (see, e.g., Boylan-Kolchin et al. 2006).”
AGN-driven quenching of star formation: morphological and dynamical implications for early-type galaxies (2013, background): “As already highlighted by many authors (e.g. Boylan-Kolchin et al. 2006; Khochfar & Silk 2006b; Maller et al. 2006; Naab et al. 2006, 2007; Bournaud et al. 2007; De Lucia & Blaizot 2007; Guo & White 2008; Hopkins et al. 2009; Nipoti et al. 2009; Feldmann et al. 2010; Shankar et al. 2013, and…”
Hubble Space Telescope and Spitzer Imaging of Red and Blue Galaxies at z ~ 2.5: A Correlation between Size and Star Formation Activity from Compact Quiescent Galaxies to Extended Star-forming Galaxies (2007, background): “Models suggest that such ‘‘dry mergers’’ could decrease the velocity dispersion and increase the size of the resulting remnant (Nipoti et al. 2003; Boylan-Kolchin et al. 2006).”
GMASS ultradeep spectroscopy of galaxies at $z$ ~ 2 - II. Superdense passive galaxies: how did they form and evolve? (2008, methodology): “According to some models (Nipoti et al. 2003a, Nipoti et al. 2003b, Dominguez-Tenreiro et al. 2006, Naab et al. 2007, Ciotti et al. 2007, Boylan-Kolchin et al. 2006), this process can increase the final size and mass of the system without altering substantially the stellar population content.”
Structure and Kinematics of Early-Type Galaxies from Integral Field Spectroscopy (2016, background): “…properties of galaxies as a function of time (redshift), which can be directly compared with numerical simulations (e.g. Robertson et al. 2006; Boylan-Kolchin et al. 2006; Oser et al. 2012; Porter et al. 2014); and (ii) due to the fact that scaling parameters are actually expected to evolve…”
How Mergers May Affect the Mass Scaling Relation between Gravitationally Bound Systems (2007, background): “On the other hand, whereas dissipationless mergers of elliptical galaxies also tend to preserve the observed fundamental plane (Boylan-Kolchin et al. 2006; Robertson et al. 2006a), dissipationless mergers of disk galaxies tend to produce a relation that more closely parallels the virial plane.”
Cosmic Evolution of Black Holes and Spheroids. II. Scaling Relations at z = 0.36 (2007, background): “…projections of a more fundamental manifold (e.g., Hopkins et al. 2007b), allows us to disentangle stellar mass growth, stellar population evolution, and black hole growth and helps to identify the processes at work (see also Ciotti & van Albada 2001; Nipoti et al. 2003; Boylan-Kolchin et al. 2006).”
Ongoing assembly of massive galaxies by major merging in large groups and clusters from the SDSS (2007, background): “…models predict that massive ellipticals form by major dissipationless (so-called “dry”) merging oflikewise spheroidal and gas-poor progenitors (Boylan-Kolchin et al. 2006; Naab et al. 2006b), that a largef action of today’s massive ellipticals had their last major merger since redshiftz =…”
RED NUGGETS AT z ∼ 1.5: COMPACT PASSIVE GALAXIES AND THE FORMATION OF THE KORMENDY RELATION (2008, methodology): “In Figures 5 and 6 we show vectors that approximate the impact of an equal mass merger, based on the simulations performed by Boylan-Kolchin et al. (2006).”
REVISITING THE SCALING RELATIONS OF BLACK HOLE MASSES AND HOST GALAXY PROPERTIES (2012, background): “Saturation of the L − σ and M• − σ relations has been predicted from observations and simulations of the most massive galaxies (e.g., Boylan-Kolchin et al. 2006; Bernardi et al. 2007; Lauer et al. 2007a).”
Selection bias in dynamically measured supermassive black hole samples: its consequences and the quest for the most fundamental relation (2016, background): “Scatter in the black-hole galaxy scaling relations is thought to bear imprints of the amount of collisionless “dry mergers” experienced by the (most massive) hosts (e.g., Boylan-Kolchin et al. 2006; Peng 2007; Hirschmann et al. 2010; Jahnke & Macciò 2011, but see Savorgnan & Graham 2015a).”