Abstract
We report on results of N-body simulations aimed at testing the hypothesis that galaxies in X-ray-emitting (i.e., virialized) compact groups are not tidally stripped when they are embedded in a common, massive, quiescent dark matter halo. To disentangle the effects of interactions from spurious effects due to an incorrect choice of the initial galaxy model configurations, these have been chosen to be tidally limited King spheres, representing systems in quasi-equilibrium within the tidal field of the halo. The potential of the halo has been assumed to be frozen and the braking due to dynamical friction neglected. Our results confirm the hypothesis of low rates of tidal stripping and suggest a scenario for virialized compact group evolution in their quiescent phases where only very moderate tidally induced galaxy evolution can generally be expected. This implies the group is stable, provided that the dynamical friction timescales in these systems are not much shorter than the Hubble time. We discuss briefly this possibility, in particular taking account of the similarity between the velocity dispersions of a typical virialized compact group and the internal velocity dispersion of typical member galaxies.
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