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Concept
Galaxy merger
Summary
Galaxy mergers can occur when two (or more) galaxies collide. They are the most violent type of galaxy interaction. The gravitational interactions between galaxies and the friction between the gas and dust have major effects on the galaxies involved. The exact effects of such mergers depend on a wide variety of parameters such as collision angles, speeds, and relative size/composition, and are currently an extremely active area of research. Galaxy mergers are important because the merger rate is a fundamental measurement of galaxy evolution. The merger rate also provides astronomers with clues about how galaxies bulked up over time.
During the merger, stars and dark matter in each galaxy become affected by the approaching galaxy. Toward the late stages of the merger, the gravitational potential (i.e. the shape of the galaxy) begins changing so quickly that star orbits are greatly altered, and lose any trace of their prior orbit. This process is called “violent relaxation”. For example, when two disk galaxies collide they begin with their stars in an orderly rotation in the planes of the two separate disks. During the merger, that ordered motion is transformed into random energy (“thermalized”). The resultant galaxy is dominated by stars that orbit the galaxy in a complicated and random interacting network of orbits, which is what is observed in elliptical galaxies.
Mergers are also locations of extreme amounts of star formation. The star formation rate (SFR) during a major merger can reach thousands of solar masses worth of new stars each year, depending on the gas content of each galaxy and its redshift. Typical merger SFRs are less than 100 new solar masses per year. This is large compared to our Galaxy, which makes only a few new stars each year (~2 new stars). Though stars almost never get close enough to actually collide in galaxy mergers, giant molecular clouds rapidly fall to the center of the galaxy where they collide with other molecular clouds. These collisions then induce condensations of these clouds into new stars.
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