Snapshot of GalMer merger # 971 (Chilingarian et al. 2010) taken 2.5 Gyr after the start of the simulation and ∼2 Gyr after the first pericentral passage. The background greyscale image shows the distribution of stellar mass on a logarithmic scale. The red contours show the distribution of gas. Both stellar and gas images have been smoothed for clarity. The image is 750 × 750 kpc², but note that we ignore the physical scale of the system in our comparison to NGC 1316 for reasons explained in the text.