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A History of Mergers

Recent observations of the Hubble Deep Field (Abraham et al., 1996) have shown that the fraction of peculiar objects seen is significantly higher than it is among nearby galaxies. A sizable fraction of QSO hosts appear to be ongoing mergers, as originally envisioned. On a more fundamental level, mergers are thought to play an important role in structure formation in the early matter dominated epoch of the Universe.
However, mergers are not confined to exotic circumstances in history; if we look at the local Universe, there are numerous examples of disturbed galaxies that quite obviously point to galaxy interactions. Such a view was not always held; for many years, right up until the early 1970's, many held the opinion that simple gravity acting on stars could not produce the characteristic features - bridges and tails being the prime examples - of the class of peculiar galaxies.





Chris Power
Thu Sep 16 20:11:54 BST 1999