Caustic Waves in Galaxy Disks Produced in Collisions with Low Mass Companions

Abstract

At this meeting much attention has been focussed on interactions and mergers between roughly equal mass galaxies. On the contrary, I will begin by mentioning a few justifications for studying collisions with relatively low mass companions, specifically, less than about one third of the mass of the target galaxy. The first is simply that such collisions are likely to be common, given that the galaxy luminosity function is broad. The second reason is that such collisions have evidently been less well studied than collisions between nearly equal partners. However, there are a few important exceptions to this generalization, including the sinking satellite problem (e.g. Quinn and Goodman 1986), and the collisional model for the formation of shell galaxies in which a companion of negligible mass is completely disrupted(e.g. Dupraz and Combes 1986, Hernquist and Quinn 1988). The third, and potentially most important reason, is that the effects of a collision with a low-mass companion are less extreme (at least from the big galaxy’s point of view!). Thus, these effects are closer to the theorist’s ideal of a “small perturbation”. This is important for both conceptually understanding the effects of the collision, and for justifying the use of approximate numerical techniques (e.g. restricted three-body) to study them.