The formation and evolution of tidal dwarf galaxies

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Within the hierarchical structure formation scenario today’s galaxies emerge from the accumulation of smaller, gas-rich objects, the cosmological “building blocks”. As a result of angular momentum and energy conservation long, thin and gas-rich tidal arms are expelled when two such building blocks merge. These tidal arms can fragment into a series of self-gravitating dwarf galaxies under certain conditions. It is expected that the production of tidal-dwarf galaxies (TDGs) may have been much more efficient in the early universe than today, and so TDGs may form an important contribution to the faint-end of the galaxy luminosity function. This proposal aims at investigating the efficiency of the formation of TDGs in dependence of the gas fraction, the interaction morphology and mass ratio of the interacting galaxies. We also aim at studying the chemodynamical history of TDGs, in order to understand their survival and to uncover observable features that would help distinguishing them from the abundant cold-dark-matter sub-halos.