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Mergers and the Formation of Massive Ellipticals

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 May 2016

Ralf Bender
Ralf Bender*
Affiliation:
Universitäts-Sternwarte, Scheinerstr. 1, D-81679 München, Germany email: bender@usm.uni-muenchen.de

Abstract

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Many nearby luminous elliptical galaxies exhibit counter-rotating cores, minor axis rotation or peculiar velocity fields. These phenomena require that merging and accretion events played a major role in the formation of ellipticals and, equally important, that stars dominated significantly over gas in the merger progenitors. Low redshift analogues to the last stages in the formation of massive ellipticals can be observed in ultraluminous IRAS mergers. However, this does not imply that ellipticals generally formed in spiral-spiral mergers. Mergers can also occur as a consequence of inhomogenous collapse or hierarchical bottom-up structure formation and it is actually more likely that the progenitors of present-day ellipticals did not resemble present-day spirals.

Although some ellipticals most certainly were and still are formed at low redshift, the general formation epoch of massive ellipticals is likely to be found at redshifts > 1. The evidence for this is threefold: (a) the homogenous stellar populations of ellipticals, most notably the tight correlation between colors/absorption linestrengths and velocity dispersion, (b) the high overabundance of light elements relative to iron and (c) the very weak evolution of colors and linestrengths of ellipticals with redshift.

Type
Mergers in the Local Universe
Information
Symposium - International Astronomical Union , Volume 171: New Light on Galaxy Evolution , 1996 , pp. 181 - 190
Copyright
Copyright © Kluwer 1996 

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