Galaxy mergers can be classified into distinct groups due to the properties of the merging galaxies, such as their number, their comparative size and their gas richness.
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 a 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. We can see this phenomenon in merging galaxies in the nearby universe.
Yet, this process was more pronounced during the mergers that formed most elliptical galaxies we see today, which likely occurred 1–10 billion years ago, when there was much more gas (and thus more molecular clouds) in galaxies. Also, away from the center of the galaxy gas clouds will run into each other producing shocks which stimulate the formation of new stars in gas clouds.
The result of all this violence is that galaxies tend to have little gas available to form new stars after they merge. Thus if a galaxy is involved in a major merger, and then a few billion years pass, the galaxy will have very few young stars left.
This is what we see in today’s elliptical galaxies, very little molecular gas and very few young stars. It is thought that this is because elliptical galaxies are the end products of major mergers which use up the majority of gas during the merger, and thus further star formation after the merger is quenched.
One of the largest galaxy mergers ever observed consisted of four elliptical galaxies in the cluster CL0958+4702. It may form one of the largest galaxies in the Universe.
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