Go with the Flow: Understanding Inflow Mechanisms in Galaxy Collisions

Dynamical interactions between colliding spiral galaxies strongly affect the state and distribution of their interstellar gas. Observations indicate that interactions funnel gas toward the nuclei, fueling bursts of star formation and nuclear activity. To date, most numerical simulations of galaxy mergers have assumed that the gaseous and stellar disks initially have the same distribution and size. However, observations of isolated disk galaxies show that this is seldom the case; in fact, most spirals have as much or more gas beyond their optical radii as they do within. Can gas in such extended disks be efficiently transported to the nuclei during interactions? To address this question, we examine the effect of various parameters on the transport of gas to the nuclei of interacting galaxies. In addition to the relative radii of the gaseous and stellar disks, these parameters include the pericentric separation, disk orientation, fractional gas mass, presence of a bulge, treatment of gas thermodynamics, and the spatial resolution of the numerical simulation. We found that gas accumulates in most of our simulated nuclei, but the efficiency of inflow is largely dependent upon the encounter geometry. Dissipation alone is not enough to produce inflows; an efficient mechanism for extracting angular momentum from the gas is necessary. Several different mechanisms are seen in these experiments. Aside from mode-driven inflows (such as, but not limited to, bars) and ram-pressure sweeping, both of which have been previously described and well studied, we supply the first quantitative study of an often-seen process: the formation of massive gas clumps in Jeans-unstable tidal shocks, and their subsequent delivery to the nuclei via dynamical friction.