Browsing by Subject "galaxy mergers"

In this thesis, 16 gas-free galaxy merger simulations were run in order to determine the dominant effect that causes the formation of cores, i.e. regions of ”missing light”, in the centers of massive early-type galaxies. The simulations were run on the Mahti supercomputer at the Finnish IT Centre for Science (CSC), using the simulation codes GADGET-3 and KETJU. The merging of galaxies will eventually lead to the merging of their central supermassive black holes (SMBHs). The evolution of a SMBH binary can be divided into three phases: the dynamical friction phase, the three-body interaction phase and gravitational wave (GW) emission phase. After the GW emission phase, the merged SMBH may receive a recoil velocity. To study the effects of these three phases on the formation of the core, three kinds of simulations were run. These include three GADGET runs and thirteen KETJU runs that can be divided into two groups, since eight of the runs had GW recoils enabled. When using only GADGET, the three-body interactions are not modeled due to the softening of gravity. Using KETJU allows for modeling the later evolution of the SMBH binary, including the three-body interaction phase, the GW emission phase and the resulting GW recoil. The initial conditions for the progenitor galaxies were motivated by the galaxy NGC 1600. The same stellar and dark matter profiles were used for each simulated galaxy. Two different SMBH masses were used. One KETJU merger was also run without SMBHs. For the runs with spinning SMBHs, the spin directions and magnitudes were chosen in such a way that different magnitudes of recoil velocity would be achieved. The size of the core can be determined from the brightness profile of the galaxy, assuming a constant mass-to-light ratio. The commonly used core-Sérsic profile was fit to the surface mass density profiles of the merger remnant galaxies. The best-fit parameter values were then used to estimate the sizes of the cores, such as the core radii. The amount of missing mass in the centers of the galaxies, i.e. the mass deficits, were also computed based on the core-Sérsic fits. We found that the mass deficit correlates positively with the mass of the SMBH for all the KETJU runs. Including GW recoils in the simulations was found to increase the mass deficits by roughly the equivalent of one SMBH mass compared to the KETJU runs without the recoils. The formation of cores was the weakest for the GADGET runs, since the cores were created only by the large-scale dynamics. No core was formed in the run without SMBHs, as expected. Thus, we can conclude that SMBHs are essential for the formation of cores in massive early type galaxies, and the largest cores are formed when GW recoils are included in the model.