Encounters between spherical galaxies II: systems with dark halo

Abstract

We performe N-body simulations of encounters between spherical systems surrounded by a spherical halo. Following a preceding paper with a similar aim, the initial systems include a spherical Jaffe model for the luminous matter and a Hernquist model for the halo. The merger remnants from this sample are mainly slowly rotating, prolate spheroids with a radially anisotropic velocity distribution. The results are compared with real-life ellipticals and with the models without halo in paper I. We argue that elliptical galaxies with evidence of dark matter could be formed in the field via a merger of spheroids surrounded by a dark matter halo, while ellipticals with no evidence of dark matter might be formed via a merger of two spheroids in a cluster.