Issue |
A&A
Volume 689, September 2024
|
|
---|---|---|
Article Number | A279 | |
Number of page(s) | 14 | |
Section | Numerical methods and codes | |
DOI | https://doi.org/10.1051/0004-6361/202449700 | |
Published online | 19 September 2024 |
An effective model for the tidal disruption of satellites undergoing minor mergers with axisymmetric primaries
1
Università degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca,
Piazza della Scienza 3,
20126
Milano,
Italy
2
INFN, Sezione di Milano-Bicocca,
Piazza della Scienza 3,
20126
Milano,
Italy
3
INAF – Osservatorio Astronomico di Brera,
via Brera 20,
20121
Milano,
Italy
4
DiSAT, Università degli Studi dell’Insubria,
via Valleggio 11,
22100
Como,
Italy
Received:
22
February
2024
Accepted:
25
June
2024
According to the hierarchical formation paradigm, galaxies form through mergers of smaller entities and massive black holes (MBHs), if present at their centers, migrate to the nucleus of the newly formed galaxy, where they form binary systems. The formation and evolution of MBH binaries, and in particular their coalescence timescale, is highly relevant for current and future facilities aimed at detecting the gravitational wave signal produced by the MBHs close to coalescence. While most of the studies targeting this process are based on hydrodynamic simulations, the high computational cost makes a complete parameter space exploration prohibitive. Semianalytic approaches represent a valid alternative, but they require ad hoc prescriptions for the mass loss of the merging galaxies in minor mergers due to tidal stripping, which is not commonly considered or is at best modelled assuming very idealised geometries. In this work we propose a novel, effective model for the tidal stripping in axisymmetric potentials, to be implemented in semi-analytic models. We validated our semi-analytic approach against N-body simulations considering different galaxy sizes, inclinations, and eccentricities, finding only a moderate dependence on the orbit eccentricity. In particular, we find that, for almost circular orbits, our model mildly overestimates the mass loss, and this is due to the adjustment of the stellar distribution after the mass is removed. Nonetheless, the model exhibits a very good agreement with simulations in all the considered conditions, and thus represents an extremely powerful addition to semi-analytic calculations.
Key words: methods: analytical / methods: numerical / galaxies: evolution / galaxies: interactions / galaxies: kinematics and dynamics
© The Authors 2024
Open Access article, published by EDP Sciences, under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
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