There have been several attempts to model the ``Antennae'' in the
literature. I will, however, concentrate this discussion on Toomre and
Toomre's 1972 paper, Galactic Bridges and Tails and Barnes'
1988 paper, Encounters of Disk/Halo Galaxies.
At the end of the main discussion, I will briefly discuss some of the
observations that must be satisfied if the models are to be considered successful reconstructions.
Toomre and Toomre's 1972 paper is seen by many as the seminal work in
this field, triggering a paradigm shift and establishing mergers and
tidal interactions as respectable subjects for theoretical
inquiry. Although there were several papers in the literature dealing
with interacting galaxies at that time and despite the fact that their
modeling of galaxies as central masses surrounded by disks of test
particles was hardly novel, there were many virtues to the
Toomres' work: