Bibcode
Smith, R.; Sánchez-Janssen, R.; Beasley, M. A.; Candlish, G. N.; Gibson, B. K.; Puzia, T. H.; Janz, J.; Knebe, A.; Aguerri, J. A. L.; Lisker, T.; Hensler, G.; Fellhauer, M.; Ferrarese, L.; Yi, S. K.
Bibliographical reference
Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, Volume 454, Issue 3, p.2502-2516
Advertised on:
12
2015
Citations
102
Refereed citations
98
Description
We conduct a comprehensive numerical study of the orbital dependence of
harassment on early-type dwarfs consisting of 168 different orbits
within a realistic, Virgo-like cluster, varying in eccentricity and
pericentre distance. We find harassment is only effective at stripping
stars or truncating their stellar discs for orbits that enter deep into
the cluster core. Comparing to the orbital distribution in cosmological
simulations, we find that the majority of the orbits (more than three
quarters) result in no stellar mass loss. We also study the effects on
the radial profiles of the globular cluster systems of early-type
dwarfs. We find these are significantly altered only if harassment is
very strong. This suggests that perhaps most early-type dwarfs in
clusters such as Virgo have not suffered any tidal stripping of stars or
globular clusters due to harassment, as these components are safely
embedded deep within their dark matter halo. We demonstrate that this
result is actually consistent with an earlier study of harassment of
dwarf galaxies, despite the apparent contradiction. Those few dwarf
models that do suffer stellar stripping are found out to the virial
radius of the cluster at redshift = 0, which mixes them in with less
strongly harassed galaxies. However when placed on phase-space diagrams,
strongly harassed galaxies are found offset to lower velocities compared
to weakly harassed galaxies. This remains true in a cosmological
simulation, even when haloes have a wide range of masses and
concentrations. Thus phase-space diagrams may be a useful tool for
determining the relative likelihood that galaxies have been strongly or
weakly harassed.
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